


when you are fallen

by haemodye



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Big Bang Challenge, Case Fic, Community: cap_ironman, Complete, Fix-It, Forgiveness, Friendship, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Love Confessions, M/M, Mystery, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Civil War, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Post-Fix-It, Reconciliation, Resolved Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Supportive Avengers, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:34:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27587527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haemodye/pseuds/haemodye
Summary: Tony and Steve have finally made up after Civil War. They’re friends again. It’s everything Steve wanted. It’s a pity, then, that Steve has to go and ruin everything by dying in Tony’s arms. It’s not a bad place to die. It’s not even the first time.When Steve wakes up as a ghost—Tony’s personal haunting—he learns all sorts of things he’s sure Tony never wanted him to know. Chief among them: Tony’s been in love with Steve for a long time, and Steve’s apparently the last to know.Steve’s been dead before, and it didn’t take. He’s determined to make sure that he comes back from this one. But first he has to convince Tony that he hasn’t gone mad from grief, and that Steve is here to stay.
Relationships: Bethany Cabe & Tony Stark, Carol Danvers & Tony Stark, Reed Richards & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 94
Kudos: 278
Collections: 2020 Captain America/Iron Man Big Bang





	1. blue around the mourning moon

**Author's Note:**

> Here we are!! My first Cap-Ironman Big Bang where I'm the writer instead of the artist. :D
> 
> I was so, so lucky to get two incredibly talented artists for this bang. Cat, thank you for never sniping at me for not replying quickly to emails ( TAT ) and bringing Steve's death to life in bright and bloody colour! (Get it? Ghost pun.) And Lu, thank you so, so much for giving me not one but TWO beautiful, heartbreaking images of Sad!Ghost!Steve. You were both a true delight to work with and all a writer could want from a bang. <3 <3 <3 Please please please check out the art, keeping in mind that Lu's is spoiler-y. Cat [Art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27558088), Lu [Art 1+2](https://oluka.tumblr.com/private/634887224061739008/tumblr_ONpQFfkYC6nU2BjC5)
> 
> During the height of COVID, I made it to page 15 of the Angst With A Happy Ending tag in order to cope with how shit the world was. There’s something deeply comforting about those stories in times of peril: the knowledge that, despite how horrible things seem, it’s all gonna work out. So in many ways, this story is a thank you to all the beautiful, dedicated fic authors out there that got me through a shit year. I hope in turn my story can quench that thirst in you, too.
> 
> Usual warnings: canon-typical violence, eventual explicit sexual content, alcohol/drug use, references to alcoholism (ah, 616 Tony...), major character death (obviously) albeit temporary. Last but not least, it can be argued that some of the sexy times are dubcon as [SPOILERS] Steve can't verbally communicate with Tony and Tony isn't absolutely positive it's really Steve he’s touching. If that's gonna bother you, please skip those sections! I will warn on individual chapters.[/SPOILERS]
> 
> I think that's it. Check the end notes for info on 'verse if you care about that sort of thing, but tl;dr this is wildly AU after the events of Civil War. No incursions or skrulls or illuminati. Just a world where everyone is recovered/recovering from Civil War and trying to be/is friends again. If you want gritty politics I've got other fics for that. Keep in mind also that this is close third with an unreliable narrator, and the characters' views are not necessarily my own lol. 
> 
> Keep all arms and legs inside the vehicle and enjoy 40k of angsty slow burn romance!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Eddi Reader's ["Bell, Book, and Candle"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9B86acLQw)

> what will I do  
>  when you are fallen  
>    
>  Where will I sleep  
>  How will I ride  
>  What will I hunt  
>    
>  Where can I go  
>    
>  – May Swenson, "Question"

This is not Steve’s first death, but it might be the one that haunts him the most.

“No. God, _no_.”

Tony’s eyes are wild in his face. His hand is wrapped firm around Steve’s throat, trying to stem the bleeding, and he looks so frightened. Steve’s always hated to see Tony frightened, probably because it’s so rare. Tony is the futurist. He always knows what to do next, and so he’s never afraid. If he is, he knows better than to show it. He’s always been too proud for that.

“Steve, stay with me, okay? Help’s coming, just, stay with me. Stay. Hold on. Stay with me, don’t- you can’t, don’t go, just-”

“’S okay,” Steve says, or tries to say. Tony’s high cheekbones are limned with tears, shining bright under the streetlights. It’s an alright final vision. Tony’s arms are a good place to die. He tries to reach up, to brush the tears from Tony’s face, but he can’t quite manage it. He settles for wrapping his fingers around Tony’s wrist instead. “Ton’…nnn.”

“Steve, _don’t_.”

Steve wants to tell him not to blame himself, but he knows that would be a waste of breath. He tries to tighten his grip on Tony’s wrist.

“’S okay,” he tells Tony again, but Tony isn’t listening. He’s yelling into his phone, his eyes never leaving Steve’s face. He’s afraid to look away and miss the end. “Ton, dun’ cr-”

“Hush,” Tony says. He drops his phone to the ground, cupping Steve’s face with his free hand. “Don’t you leave me again. Don’t you dare!”

That’s a plea he knows he can’t fulfil. Tony knows it, too. “Sorry,” he slurs. He offers Tony an apologetic smile.

It’s the last thing he can manage to do, but that’s alright. It’s been a good life.

Steve closes his eyes and listens to the choked, furious sob that wrenches its way out of Tony’s chest. His only regret is that he and Tony have finally patched things up. They’re finally friends again. Things have been good.

His last thought is that he wishes he’d had more time with Tony.

And then, Steve Rogers dies.

\--

Steve’s been dead before.

They all have, multiple times. It’s a hell of a thing, to know that you’ve died and come back to life. He remembers reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a kid, thinking what it would be like if he and Arnie had washed up on the rocky shores of the East River somewhere. How many folks would have mourned a couple of dead immigrant kids?

It was a strange juxtaposition to now, knowing mothers and old men he’d never met have mourned his passing. He’s read countless of his own eulogies. He’s woken up in a body he thought should be dead three times over more times than he knows, which is truly saying something. It isn’t like a good Catholic boy to take miracles for granted.

Still, this is the first time he’s woken up _outside_ of his body.

He’s standing across from Tony, which is enough to make Steve’s breath shudder in his noncorporeal chest. He’s seen the footage of Tony breaking down at his funeral. He doesn’t want to be here, to see this. Between them, he can see his own body. His face is pale and unmarred, sealed up in some sort of cryochamber. He tries to press his hands to the glass pane, but they go right through.

“Tony?” Steve tries.

Tony isn’t looking at him. He’s standing over Steve’s body silently, his arms folded across his chest. He looks tired, but that’s nothing new. Steve would almost call his expression impassive, if he didn’t know Tony as well as he did. Instead, he watches the minute tremble of Tony’s jaw, the way his hands are shaking. Tony wants a drink, and he wants it badly.

Steve goes over to him, bumps his shoulder through his friend’s. “Ah, come on, Shellhead,” he says. His voice wavers, echoing against the sterile metal walls. “You know it’s probably temporary.”

“How many times have we seen only the false and the flaws and never noticed the sweetness?” Tony murmurs to himself. A quote, from Tom Sawyer.

Well. Never let it be said that he and Tony didn’t think alike. Either two peas in a pod or diametrically opposed, that was them.

Steve rubs a hand over his mouth. “So am I in a coma, or what?” he asks, but no one answers him.

That’s alright; he’s not worried. He knows Tony will figure it out.

He follows Tony up through the Triskelion, mostly for lack of anything else to do. Carol’s waiting for him outside, and she puts a silent arm around his shoulders and escorts him through. The way that Tony slumps into her shoulder is painful to watch. Steve desperately wishes he could hug him, but he supposes if he could, Tony wouldn’t be so damn sad.

She bundles him into a helicopter and walks over to chat with the pilot. Steve hesitates for about fifteen seconds before putting his hand on the side of the helicopter. Once again, it goes right through.

“Right,” he says, strangely unsettled. This isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to him. It’s not even the first time he’s been incorporeal. He just doesn’t like how it makes him feel, like he’s…well. A ghost.

Still, he doesn’t want to be left at the Triskelion. He wants to go back to the tower with Tony. So he gingerly pushes his body into the metal, slipping through the wall of the helicopter and climbing up into the seat next to him. Tony’s got his forehead pressed to the glass, his breath fogging the window. His expression is bleak as Steve’s ever saw it.

“I don’t think I can do this again,” Tony whispers, and Steve’s heart crumples in his chest. He reaches out to touch the skin at the back of Tony’s neck. It’s soft, he knows, from hugging Tony, because it’s the one spot he can touch Tony when he’s in the armour. It’s a place his hand is familiar with. He gets the barest impression of warmth against his fingertips, but he can’t touch Tony. His hand passes right through.

Carol opens the door, slides in. She looks at Tony for a long time.

“Strap in,” she says finally, and Tony takes a deep breath. He sits up, reaches for the straps with unsteady hands, but he loses hold of one, and it swings wild. The clang that it creates when it falls back against the wall is deafening. “Hey. Deep breath, Avenger.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, but there’s nothing in it. He doesn’t even sound like he’s there.

“Tony,” Carol says, and there’s a warning in it that Steve doesn’t understand. Fear, maybe. “Talk to me.”

“They always leave,” Tony whispers. It’s not quite audible over the slow thump of the chopper’s idling blades, but Steve hears it anyhow. The desolation in it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

Carol’s face wipes clean. Her nostrils flare, hands reaching out, as though she can stop Tony from imploding before her eyes. ”What?”

“They always leave,” Tony says again. The easiness with which the words come is all wrong. They rip the breath from Steve’s throat with their brutality, and they pull Carol in like a magnet. She crushes Tony to her chest, his face buried in the side of her neck. “I’m a genius, but that’s not enough. A brain in a can. I’ve never been enough to make anyone stay-”

“I’m still here,” Carol tells him, and her voice betrays just how much she’s hurting, too. “I’m here, Tony. I’ve got you.”

“I just-” Tony’s voice is breaking, now. His fingers are bone white under the flaking bloodstains. It’s Steve’s blood, of course: still dried under his fingernails, caught in the grooves of his calluses. Steve watches him clutch at Carol’s biceps, the leather of her jacket creaking under his fingers, and feels the clench of Tony’s hands around his heart. “Why couldn’t he stay?”

“I wanted to,” Steve says desperately. “Tony. I’m right here.”

Steve’s hand passes right through Tony’s curls. His hands are shaking, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t touch him.

“Wasn’t once enough?” Tony sobs, and Carol just rocks him back and forth, silent tears leaking from her eyes. “I barely survived the first time-”

“You didn’t,” Carol says fiercely, and Steve chokes back a gasp, because, _oh_. So this is the fear, the thing that Carol had guarded herself against. It was something Steve didn’t know to be afraid of. “So don’t you dare die on me, Tony. I lost both of you once, and the world was so much worse off for it. You have to stay with us, okay? You have to stay with us. You have to stay with me.”

“I can’t,” Tony gasps, but Carol only clutches him tighter. “I can’t, Carol. I can’t.”

“You will,” she counters, and Tony lets out a wrecked sob, thrashing in her grip. “We will get through this. All of us will get through this.”

“But not him,” he says. He’s crying like a child, now, saying it over and over: “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

Carol holds him, and rocks him back and forth, and tangles her fingers in his hair. Together, they cry, exactly how Steve expects: Carol, silent and blotchy with fury in her eyes, Tony desperate and aching, unfairly photogenic with his olive skin that refuses to betray a flush. Steve wants to tell them both that it’s okay, that they don’t have to take everything upon themselves and press everything down so hard. He wants to hold them both in his arms and let them cry on his shoulder instead.

But Steve can’t do any of those things. Steve is dead, or something like it. So instead he hovers his hand over the back of Tony’s neck, and he skims an ineffectual hand over Carol’s back, and he hopes that somehow, soon, Tony figures this whole mess out.

\--

When Tony’s been on the phone with Hank McCoy for two and a half hours, Steve thinks he may as well leave. He hasn’t been able to figure out what they’re talking about, really. Mostly they seem to be trying to figure out why the serum isn’t healing him like it should. They’ve gone round in circles about it four times, occasionally conferencing with Hank Pym, or Xavier, or Reed, or, or, or. Steve thinks they’re barking up the wrong tree. Clearly this is magic. So he figures he’ll take a walk down to the Sanctum, and see if Strange can see him or not.

He gets as far as the emergency stairwell before he begins to feel…strained, maybe. His hands begin to glimmer before his eyes, like he’s losing the ability to hold his shape. He takes another step, testing, and his whole body shifts, nauseatingly, a ripple wave of terribleness that starts at his feet and rolls all the way up to his head.

“What the heck,” he mutters. He reaches a hand out towards the door, then tries to push his way through like he did with the helicopter. One more step. Just one more step-

With a hideous, mind-blanking rush, Steve-… Well. He doesn’t really know what he does. One moment, he was trying to go through the door to the stairs. The next, he’s crumpled on the ground at Tony’s feet. Tony’s arguing with Reed and Hank now, standing, and when he moves to pace Steve gets dragged along on the ground behind him like a dog on a leash. He feels like he’s going to be violently ill.

“Tony, stop,” he grates out, but of course, Tony can’t hear him. Instead, Steve stumbles to his feet, trailing along behind Tony like a lurching zombie while the world spins dizzily around him. He is absurdly glad that he doesn’t really have a stomach to empty.

Eventually, Tony throws his hands up and falls onto the workshop couch. Steve falls down next to him, half into his lap. And then he lays there, and does his best to tone out the argument happening above him, because he feels sicker than he’s ever felt with the serum in his body. If he had a head, it would be splitting open with pain.

“Well,” he groans to himself, “that didn’t go so well.”

“This doesn’t make any fucking _sense_ ,” Tony snarls, mostly in his ear.

Steve can’t help but nod in agreement.

* * *

It had been a stupid way to die, was the thing.

Steve had always thought he’d go out in a blaze of glory. He always had in the past. And he didn’t mind it, so much, dying for the right reasons; saving the world from Thanos, or Onslaught, or Korvac. He’d always died standing up for what he thought was right, side by side with his friends.

He and Tony had been playing basketball on the court across the street from the IFC. Steve had wanted to see Audiard’s _A Prophet_ , and Tony had gone along, all the while complaining that he could have the film screened privately for Steve if he wanted. He went anyway, though, and Steve had smiled and let Tony buy the tickets and the popcorn and the little chocolates with white sprinkles on the top that made them look a little like the pasties the showgirls used to wear. He was glad, to be at a place where he and Tony could just spend time together again, easy as anything. Nobody made him feel right in his skin like Tony did. He’d missed that so much when they were fighting. He’d felt deeply, strangely unmoored, floating through the days like a ghost.

“Hah,” Steve mutters. He rubs a hand through his hair, watching where Tony’s fallen asleep against his worktop, his head pillowed on his folded arms.

He’d tried to leave two more times, both without success. On the second go, after fighting through what felt like the worst electroshock torture of his life, he’d pushed through the pain and nausea and opened his eyes to find himself passed out on the floor next to his own motionless body. It had taken him another two hours to figure out how to get back to Tony, and by the end he’d been so exhausted and panicked that he’d lay at Tony’s feet for a solid twenty minutes, panting with exertion, trying to wrap his shaking fingers around Tony’s bare, fine-boned ankles and putting his hands right through him every damn time.

It seems that there are only two places he can be: with his body, or with Tony. He isn’t sure if that’s because Tony had been the one holding him when he died or if it’s because he’s loathe to leave the man alone, as miserable as he looks, but the long and short of it is he’s stuck here. Better than looking at his own lifeless body, locked up in the bowels of SHIELD, at any rate.

Through eavesdropping on Tony’s calls, he’d found out that practically every scientist Steve could think of had looked him over before he’d woken up as a ghost. He’d thought that maybe Xavier would be able to see him, _hear_ him, but shouting at him mentally and verbally while he’d been on Tony’s screen hadn’t had any effect. He’d thought about trying to walk up to Xavier’s place, but quickly dismissed the idea after his the last time getting snapped back to Tony’s side like a rubber band. It was such a deeply unpleasant experience, and Steve isn’t really interested in trying it again soon. Maybe when he feels less like he’s going to throw up.

It had been 78 hours since Steve’s death, and this is the first time Tony’s slept since it happened. He’d spent the entirety of the first night pulling blood from Angel, Logan, and every other regenerator and immortal-type in the superhero community. Nothing had helped. He’d even tried talking to Loki and Doom. He’d hovered over vials of Steve’s blood with the Hanks. He’d spent a sparse fifteen minutes crying silently, violently, piteously in the bathroom, then washed his face and come out and done it all over again.

Tony hasn’t spoken to Stephen, as far as Steve knows, but he also knows that’s because Tony doesn’t think that this is supernatural. Steve had no life signs. His throat had been slit, deep enough to cut through both arteries and his trachea. They’d stitched him up and given him some of his own blood, kept specifically for these circumstances, but he’d already flatlined by the time they’d gotten to him. He is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Steve has come back before. There’s no reason why he can’t come back from this. But even with the blood transfusions and the healing factor, he hasn’t shown any improvement. He hasn’t healed. Eventually, they’d made the call to put him on ice.

Steve hadn’t been awake for most of it. He’d watched Tony hash it out, over and over again. Tony had told the story until his throat was sore, until his lips were chapped, but eventually he’d reached acceptance. Which is why he’s here, in the workshop, asleep at a worktop. There’s still a smudge of Steve’s blood on him, behind his right ear. Steve has the strangest sensation, looking at it: like he’s glad, that there’s something left of him on Tony. He feels like once it’s gone, that’s it. It’ll be the nail in his coffin, so to speak.

Steve paces the room a few more times. He pokes at the various projects Tony leaves half-finished everywhere. He peers at the old armours, feeling deeply unsettled when there’s no reflection to be seen in the highly polished metal.

Eventually, he returns to the worktop where Tony is passed out. He sits on the table, and he brushes his fingers through Tony’s hair.

“Sorry, Shellhead.”

Tony doesn’t stir.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, cathalinaheart's lovely art for that first scene is here: [Art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27558088)
> 
> And [Oluka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lomku/pseuds/oluka) did the banner!! <3
> 
> I will only be embedding the banner as personally I mostly read fics on my phone and find it super annoying when I can't see the whole image and it takes up a lot of scrolling space and just makes my life difficult lol... but I will link in A/N before and after for the relevant scenes!


	2. open this ghost with millionary knives of wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from E. E. Cummings, [“Enter No” or alternatively “#67”](http://www.angelfire.com/indie/beladonna/eecummings.html) (second poem down)

> Every year  
>  everything  
>  I have ever learned
> 
> in my lifetime  
>  leads back to this: the fires  
>  and the black river of loss  
>    
>  – Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

Steve’s funeral is just as crowded the second time.

Tony is supposed to deliver the eulogy again. Steve isn’t sure whose harebrained idea that was. Probably Tony’s. The man never did learn how to give himself a break.

Steve watches him walk up to the podium with his heart in his throat. Tony looks so tired.

There’s a rustling among the gathered masses: heroes and friends and family at the front, then military and SHIELD personnel. A few hundred people Steve has never met. Crying families. Strangers. He sits in the grass at Sam’s feet and looks up at Tony, standing there in his dark suit, his expression sombre and collected.

Only Steve knows how much of a lie it is. Tony had spent fifteen minutes doing his makeup that morning, only to start crying and have to start over again. It was amazing, watching the little brush swipe over Tony’s olive skin, erasing the dark circles. He’d never had occasion to watch Tony put on makeup before, despite having his own done for the talk shows and whatnot. He wasn’t surprised, per se, but it was strangely intimate to watch Tony put on this smaller, more subtle kind of mask. The mask of being Tony Stark, lauded orator and public figure. Steve felt closer to him than he had in a long time, sitting on Tony’s bathroom counter and watching his friend erase the visual markers of grief from his handsome, weary face. It had made Steve want to hold him, and he’d reached out unthinking to brush his fingertips against the sharp line of Tony’s jaw. For a moment, he’d almost thought that Tony had felt it, but then he’d realised that Tony had stopped because he was crying. Even there, with no one to watch him, he did so silently. It was almost beautiful, the way he closed his eyes and let grief take him like a wave.

“I never thought we’d be back here so soon,” Tony says. Steve sucks in a slow, shaky breath. He glances around for Stephen, but he hasn’t been able to find the sorcerer yet. None of the other magic wielders seem to be able to see him.

Tony looks down, swallows once. When he opens his eyes again, they’re gem bright with tears. A bevy of shutters go off, and Steve can’t blame them. Tony is the perfect image of subtle, tasteful grief.

“There will be a hundred, thousand eulogies written to the monomyth of Captain America,” Tony says, and Steve bites his lip on a sad smile, because he already knows what Tony’s gonna say next. “I’m not here for that. I’m here to talk about my friend, Steve Rogers: a chronically-ill, second-generation Irish immigrant, who against all odds, fought for what was right again and again, no matter what it cost him.

“Steve wasn’t particularly interested in honours. His conviction—that he was right, damn it, no matter whether he was giving me hell over which show to put on the television or about the intricacies of government policy—did not come from arrogance. Although it wasn’t always easy for me to remember that when we were arguing.” The audience titters, and Tony quirks a small, sad smile. His hand comes up to grip the podium, white-knuckled.

“No, Steve’s convictions came from a deep and abiding purity of thought. He believed—wholly and uncompromisingly—in things that most people left by the wayside. That I have left by the wayside, more times than I care to confess. Things we so often discard as plebeian or naïve: truth, justice, compassion-”

Tony’s voice breaks. It’s the kind of breaking that precipitates a sob, and for one, dizzying moment, Steve thinks he is about to watch history repeat itself. Jim shifts, as if to go up to him, and Carol too, begins to rise from her seat. But Tony takes a deep breath, and shakes his head slightly. He fixes a weak smile to his lips and offers it to his friends. Then he turns back to the cards in his hands.

“Martyr,” Steve tells him, his tone embarrassingly fond. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Being friends with Steve meant bearing witness to the kind of small, simple kindnesses that often left me breathless in their sincerity. Steve was-” Tony stumbles, then pushes through it bravely. “-an attentive, careful friend. He always had an encouraging word for someone who looked down. Especially the younger, less experienced members of the Avengers. He always knew when we weren’t taking care of ourselves, and how to help.”

“’Cause it’s always you,” Steve murmurs, closing his eyes, because he can’t bear looking at Tony any longer. He rests his forehead on his bent wrists, incapable and devastated, as always, by Tony’s excruciating self-deprecation and selflessness. “You’re always the one not taking care of yourself.”

“Steve knew people. He knew how they worked. He knew how they fit together. He knew how his enemies would behave, almost with preternatural intelligence, which was what made him such a fearsome tactician. But he knew real people, too. Citizens he met and spoke to every day. The name of the man who ran the bodega three avenues over from the mansion, who’d always made him his breakfast sandwich just how he liked it. The regular volunteers at the soup kitchen he volunteered at. He knew the name of the kids and spouses of every security guard who works the front desk at the tower. My favourite restaurant. What I want to eat when I’m having a bad day. What I want to eat after a gruelling battle. What show to put on when I need a break. What record to put on when I’m in a good mood. All of his eidetic super-soldier brain abilities, zeroed down to what kind of milk and sugar every Avenger who’s ever lived with us likes in their morning coffee or tea.

“Steve believed in the good in people, truly and sincerely, and that belief was a beacon,” Tony says, and Steve could laugh because Tony _is_ good. All of the Avengers, each and every one of them, are better people than Steve could even begin to express. “Steve had a luminous quality that could be wholly attributed to the strength of his spirit. He was a bastion of light that called to each and every soul he touched. That was Steve’s power: more than his super strength, or his healing, or his eidetic memory. Steve’s power was to see the good in people, and to manifest it. To make real the ideals that lived in his heart. To bring out the beauty in someone or something that only he could see.

“I don’t need to tell anyone that the world is poorer without my friend in it. I suppose I don’t need to say that it was richer for his presence, either. He made each and every one of us better, myself more than anyone. So what I wish—selfishly and more than anything—is for that light not to go out. I know that’s what Steve would say, if he were here with us. He would want us to believe in ourselves, in the light within each sapient creature in the multiverse. He would want us to keep taking care of each other. He would want us to become the best versions of ourselves.

“Every day, I have strived to become the kind of man that Steve Rogers would be proud to know. I expect for the rest of my life, I’ll have him whispering in my ear. For my sins, I’m sure he’d tell me. I will treat this haunting as a gift, as I expect each and every person who knew him will as well: the gift of Steve Rogers in your life, ever urging you to be a better friend, a better citizen, a better lover, a better parent or student or soldier or athlete. A better person, striving for a better world.

“In this way, Steve will never die. He will forever live on as that little voice in our heads that tells us to do better, to work harder, and to forgive ourselves when we can’t. He will always be alongside us, urging us on, loving us as we often cannot love ourselves.”

“ _Tony_ ,” Steve says. He’s crying, and it’s his own damn funeral, and he’s right here. He’s less than twenty feet from Tony’s untouchable, tear-tracked face. “Tony, you stupid, beautiful bastard.”

“I’ll miss you Steve. Every day for the rest of my life. I wish you the peace you so rightfully deserve.”

He knows it isn’t normal for people to clap after eulogies, but the deafening silence that accompanies Tony’s exit from the stage feels deeply wrong. More people are supposed to speak, and Steve might have liked to hear them, but instead he’s tugged along as Tony keeps walking: around the back of the stage, and down, into the thicket of graves and further, not even really looking where he’s going.

Eventually, Tony reaches the black town car he’d come in. He swings the door open and gets inside, and Steve slips through the metal and glass just in time to catch Tony burying his face in his hands. His shoulders begin to shake, and then his whole body. He looks like he might shake apart.

“Tony,” Steve says, helplessly. He puts an arm around Tony, careful not to go through his shoulders. “Come on, don’t do this to yourself.”

“Fuck,” Tony gaps, and Steve heaves a sigh. He kneels down in the footwell, half his body in the driver’s seat, and hovers his hands over Tony’s knees. He tries to meet Tony’s gaze. “Fuck. _Fuck_.”

“Tony, please,” Steve says, but Tony can’t hear him. He’s too busy pressing the base of his palms into his eyes, his shoulders still trembling so violently, and Steve can’t just sit here and watch this. He puts his hands over Tony’s shoulders, willing him to calm down. He presses his forehead to Tony’s, but he can’t even feel the barest hint of warmth.

“Fuck, Steve,” Tony says, and Steve blinks, wide-eyed at him.

“Tony?” he says. He leans back, eyes darting across Tony’s face as Tony brushes the tears out of his lashes. He watches Tony stitch himself back together. “Tony, can you hear me?”

“Jesus fuck,” Tony says, and Steve sighs.

“Ah, Shellhead.”

They sit in silence for a long time. Tony leans up into the front, right through Steve, and pulls a tissue box out from the glove compartment. He dabs ineffectually at his eyes, then checks his reflection in his phone camera. He blows his nose until he can breathe without that horrible, wet gurgle plaguing every breath.

“Okay,” he tells himself. He cracks a small smile, tremulous and bitter enough to make Steve hate it. “Up and at ‘em, Avenger. That’s what you’d say, right?”

“No. I’d tell you to forget about the press, go home, and take a nap,” Steve tells him crossly. “And then we’d argue about it, because you are terrible at taking care of yourself when you think there’s something that needs doing. But there’s always something that needs doing, and so you never take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, as though he can hear Steve’s stupid, ineffectual nagging. He puts on a plastic smile, a pair of sunglasses. Then he opens the door, gets out of the car, and starts the long trip back to Steve’s funeral.

Steve wonders if maybe watching Tony hurt himself is punishment for _his_ sins. He wonders if he can stay here. He doesn’t want to go back and watch Tony go through the motions for hours, pretending to be fine when inside, he’s falling to pieces. He wants Tony to stay out of the public eye, to go home to where people he loves can fuss over him.

He can feel whatever it is that keeps him attached to Tony pulling. He resists it, mostly out of pique, but then something exciting happens. Tony stops in the middle of the gravestones. He rubs at his chest, a small furrow appearing between his brows.

Steve watches with bated breath. He’s using all his considerable strength to stay seated in the car, and for a moment it feels like Tony’s looking right at him. He looks confused, and irritated, and vaguely distracted in the way that he does when he’s trying to figure out an engineering problem and he can’t quite work out what’s gone wrong.

“Tony!” Steve shouts. He waves his hands, feeling a little like an idiot. “Tony! Can you see me?”

Tony shakes his head. He shakes his whole body, like a wet dog coming in from the rain. Then he turns back towards the funeral, and Steve is snapped right back next to him, with enough force that he almost crumples to the ground with the potency of his nausea. When he reaches out an instinctual hand to catch himself on Tony’s body, his hand settles on the back of Tony’s neck, and Tony whips around with enough force to knock Steve to the ground.

Tony spins in a full circle, brows furrowed tight. He touches the back of his neck, then pulls his hand away and examines it, like he’d been expecting to find blood.

“I need to sleep,” he mutters, and Steve can’t help but let out a bark of laughter.

“You think?” he asks, but really, he’s giddy. For that one brief moment, he touched Tony. Tony felt him, he was sure of it. Tony felt his touch.

They’re going to figure this out. Him and Tony. They’re going to figure it out.

* * *

The first thing Tony does after Steve’s funeral is take himself off the active roster. He puts Carol in charge of the Avengers. Then he settles down in his workshop, and he dives into the next stage of grief: trying to find whatever or whoever killed Steve Rogers.

A part of Steve is glad. Steve doesn’t know what would happen if Tony had to fly while Steve was stuck on the ground. Bad things, he’s guessing. He’s imagined Tony stepping into the suit and hitting Mach 4, and being yanked along on the world’s most horrific bungee jump ride. It isn’t something he’s interested in trying out.

Steve is interested in who killed him, of course, but presently he’s got two more pressing things on his mind: first, he’s worried about the fact that Tony’s clearly driving himself crazy with guilt and grief, and second, he hasn’t been able to touch Tony again since that first time. He’s tried a handful more times to get as far away from Tony as possible, but Tony’s too preoccupied with piecing together CCTV footage and trying to gather data from the tissue they’d scraped from Steve’s wounds to notice the tug. He’s constantly on the phone with the Hanks, T’Challa, even finally calling Stephen, which is how Steve knows he’s desperate. Tony hates to rely on magic for anything.

He thinks, perhaps, Tony wanted Carol to be in charge of the Avengers so she couldn’t stop him from self-destructing down here. She’s too busy to run the team and shore up the superhero community’s crumbling morale and also make sure Tony eats three square meals a day. Jim’s been busy too, filling in for him. FRIDAY does her best, but there’s only so much an AI can do.

He is deeply, transparently grateful when Bethany Cabe makes an appearance four days in. She takes one look at Tony, passed out diagonally on the workshop cot in all his clothes, and hauls him up with one arm.

“You need a shower,” she tells him, and Tony barely has the wherewithal to blink blearily at her before she’s stripping him.

Steve politely averts his eyes. He follows them into the workshop bathroom, if only because the idea of being snapped against Tony while he’s wet and naked in the shower is. Well. It wouldn’t be right, is all.

Beth shoves Tony under the spray, not waiting for the water to get warm. Tony yelps, but he doesn’t shout at her or even really protest. Instead he just stands there morosely under the spray. Beth fetches up against the sink counter, her arms folded across her chest, and watches Tony through the frosted glass of the shower. Her expression is resolutely pitiless.

“I didn’t drag you out of the bottom of a bottle to have you kill yourself over Steve Rogers. _Again_.”

Steve hisses in a breath.

“Doesn’t anyone care what happened to him?” Tony asks, but there’s no malice in it.

“Don’t even start with that. Every super from here to K'un-Lun would slap you for even suggesting it. You’re not the only one who cares about Steve.” Beth frowns, then: the first sign of weakness Steve’s seen on her face since she burst in.

There have been many times in his life that Steve Rogers has been deeply glad that Tony Stark does not have super-hearing. Listening to Beth mutter, “Cares, cared…” under her breath, Steve is not sure he’s ever been gladder. He cannot imagine what Tony’s would do with that in his current state, but it wouldn’t be anything good.

Instead, Tony huffs a rough laugh. It’s wet, clicking terribly in his throat, and Steve closes his eyes and tries to pretend it’s just the shower steam.

“One minute, he was fine. I bent down, to- to tie my fucking shoe, and then-…”

“Cap was the best fighter of us all. He didn’t die because you tied your shoe, Tony. Whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll figure it out. But you can’t do this to yourself.”

“Why did this crazy, horror movie shit happen to Steve? Why not me? We fight…aliens, and gods, and… and even a dragon, hell, but this? A silent slasher jump scare kill? What does that? How could that happen? Why didn’t he _heal_ -”

Tony’s voice breaks, and Steve rubs a hand over his face. He hates this. He doesn’t know what to do, but what he’s doing isn’t working. Tony’s in too deep to even notice that Steve’s right here. He’s too blinded by his own grief.

“If you don’t take care of yourself, we’ll never know, now will we?” Beth asks.

Tony does not answer. Instead, Steve can see the blurry outline of his body reach for the shampoo. He begins to wash himself, slowly, as though he’s in pain. He probably is, Steve realises. He hasn’t slept much in the past weeks, and that was when Steve was around to watch him. He’s sure Tony wasn’t perfectly rested when they’d gone out together.

“Hank and I were able to figure out the shape of whatever it was that cut him. A small sickle blade, like something Widow might carry. An assassin’s weapon. Or…”

“Or?”

There’s a long silence. Steve watches Tony move through the foggy frosted glass, blurry enough that his movements are a mystery. It still makes him feel flushed, like he’s watching something he shouldn’t. Then again, he knows that every waking moment since his death has been something he shouldn’t be watching. Tony would never have wanted Steve to see him come apart like this. He knows Tony well enough to know that this exact set of circumstances would be his worst nightmare: to be brought low where Steve could see his self-termed failure.

“It’s weird,” Tony says, and for a moment, Steve isn’t sure what he’s talking about. “It’s crazy, even, maybe.”

“We’ve dealt with crazy,” Beth says evenly.

“Well.” Tony huffs another laugh, this one wilder than the last. He sounds almost hysterical. “Hank said it almost looked like his throat had… um. Like it was a claw, that did it. But that’s…weird, even for us, right?”

Well. That’s news to Steve.

He glances over to Beth to check her reaction. She’s pressing the tips of her fingers over her mouth, gaze distant as she tries to parse this new information. She’s good at figuring things like this out, Steve knows. That’s why Tony hired her to be head of Avengers security. It’s one of the reasons why he loves her. Tony’s always loved the smart ones, in all the many shapes and forms that their intelligence can take.

That, and he has a strange affinity for redheads.

“Okay,” she says, “walk me through it. Something invisible. Something…undetectable, so that even Steve’s super-senses and your incredible brain didn’t catch it. Something intangible? Something with claws? Or a person, an assassin, with a sickle blade, that could cut Steve’s throat?”

“I know it’s crazy,” Tony growls, frustrated. He turns off the shower abruptly, and Steve turns away before Tony can step out and. Well.

“I didn’t say that,” Beth says, voice mild, almost sing-song. “I’m just trying to understand what it means.”

“Stephen said he was looking into it, but.” Steve peeks, just in time to catch Tony’s helpless shrug. He’s got a towel wrapped around his waist, the other ruffling through his hair. Water slithers down the long tendons of his neck, over his sternum and the slightly paler patch of skin there where Tony’s body has been through trauma after trauma. He doesn’t quite have scars, just a slight variance of colour: a small, paler sunburst at the centre of his chest. Steve’s not even sure most people would notice it, but Steve’s noticed. The shape, now that he’s looking at it, is strangely beautiful. Sun-like, almost.

Tony clears his throat, and Steve’s face snaps up. He can feel himself blushing, and when he looks at Tony’s face, Tony’s staring straight at him. His expression is complicated, like he doesn’t know what’s going on, or where he is.

“Tony?”

Tony shakes himself, his hair flinging water across the wet tiles. “Sorry,” he chuckles. “I haven’t. Uh.”

“Been sleeping?” Beth says knowingly, and Tony offers her a wry smile. “Come on, why don’t we go upstairs? There’s bound to be some folks home. People are worried about you.”

“Are they?” Tony mutters, before he can stop himself, and Beth frowns at him.

“Don’t be a jerk, Tony. It’s childish, and cruel. People will look to you for guidance, now that Steve’s gone. You know that.”

“I’m not so sure they should.”

Beth sighs. She reaches into the cupboard under the sink, and pulls out some clean clothes: an old blue t-shirt and sweats. She passes Tony the sweats, keeping her body angled away from him in some farce of modesty. But when she unfolds the shirt, she stops. She reminds Steve of nothing so much as a wind-up toy, suddenly out of turns. A look of intense betrayal crosses her face. There is no other way to describe her expression, and Steve moves a little closer, curious. Then he covers his mouth with one hand, because of course. Of course this is the shirt that Tony keeps in the workshop for when he’s too tired to go upstairs and change and face the world. Of course this is the old, comfortable clothing Tony keeps squirreled away down here in this small, private bathroom.

The shirt has the shield on it. For a long time, Beth just stares at it, the fabric stretched between her clenched fists. Inevitably, Tony steps closer, close enough to see what’s stymied her. Then Tony takes a shuddering breath, and for the length of that breath, Steve feels as though he and Tony are one being. One body, experiencing one, terrible moment of horror. The silence in the bathroom is thick as molasses.

“Be easier if I didn’t own so much Captain America junk, huh?” Tony says, finally. The joke is weak, but it breaks the tension in the room, and Tony reaches out and takes the shirt from Beth’s shaking hands. Then he pulls it on over his wet hair, pushes his arms into the sleeves. He smooths the fabric down over his belly.

“How do I look?” he asks her. His smile is crooked, a little broken. Steve wants so badly to hug him.

“Like Cap’s best friend,” Beth says quietly. It is simultaneously the kindest and cruellest thing she could have possibly said, and Steve is so shocked at her words that he almost misses the blinding, beautiful smile that Tony looses in response. For that single, shining second he looks incandescently happy. His eyes crinkle at the corners. His teeth sparkle, white and straight and smooth.

Steve thought he was out of tears, after Tony’s stupid, incredible, self-deprecating eulogy. But once again, he is proven that the thing he has known for over a decade is still true: that Tony can wreck him, deeply and truly, unlike anyone else.


	3. bodies into pillars of light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: a character jumps off a building and does not die, but is a kind of dark sui-ish vibe, so if that's a trigger for you fyi

> Tell me, what else should I have done?  
>  Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?  
>  Tell me, what is it you plan to do  
>  With your one wild and precious life?
> 
> – Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

In the following weeks, Tony doesn’t make much progress on Steve’s killer. Eventually, what always happens to him happens again: he begins to lose focus. Steve thinks maybe someone else would be upset that Tony doesn’t keep on his monomaniac quest for vengeance, but a dead Steve is still a Steve that worries for Tony. He’s just glad that Tony stops driving himself into the ground.

Which isn’t to say that Tony stops working. More that he begins to work on everything that he’d left by the wayside. More suits, clean energy, foldable all-screen laptop tablet things. He keeps circling back to Steve’s blood, trying to figure out the trick of why Steve hadn’t healed, but he doesn’t get anywhere. Tony’s amazing at many things, but biology has never been his primary area of expertise. And the experts have their own things to deal with. Crises arise. Villains attack. Other people come back from the dead. The world spins madly on.

The first time Tony lets the suit envelop his skin since Steve’s unexpected rebirth as a ghost, it’s 3am on a Tuesday. Tony’s been on the brink of something bad for at least two hours. Steve can tell, and he’s immediately on edge. There’s been no alert. Tony hadn’t read anything particularly alarming on the holodisplays, as far as Steve saw. But an upset Tony is an unstable Tony, and he’s a little worried that Tony’s about to go and do something very stupid. Pick a fight with someone just for the hell of it, maybe.

He’s caught between letting Tony drag him around behind him, dizzy and in pain, or shifting himself over to stay with his body, but he decides that there isn’t anything he can do to stop him. And he’s been meaning to try climbing back into his body, to see if he can affect it in some way.

He’s perfected hopping between the two places by now. If he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can find something that he can only describe as a trail of breadcrumbs. Little blips, like a slight tugging at the corner of his mind. If he follows it, he can feel himself get sucked in, compressed down, pulled like a string through the eye of a needle. He imagines it’s a little bit like what Hank or Jan feel like when they shrink.

It’s deeply disorienting. He doesn’t like it at all. But it’s better than what he feels when he tries to stand still while Tony walks away from him.

He reappears in the small room where they’re keeping his body under observation, only a little wobbly from the trip. His body’s the same as it always is: frozen, blue with cold and perfectly preserved, aside from the neat line of stitches in his neck. They’d frozen him in the hopes of reviving him once they figure out what’s wrong, knowing that he’s come back from it before. It’s a smart bet. What’s most interesting to the scientists, he knows, is that he hasn’t decayed or decomposed or done whatever it is that a normal body that had been dead for a day and then frozen would do. It’s why Tony’s still trying, why he won’t give up. It’s also probably why Steve’s stuck like this. He’s not quite dead, but not alive, either.

He puts his hand into the cryochamber first, feeling a little silly about it. Touching his own hand doesn’t seem to have any effect, so he pushes through the side, then lies down on top of his own motionless body. His head sinks back into his own head. He lines his feet up as best he can. Then he concentrates on trying to move his hand, and have his flesh hand come with it. Again and again, he lifts his hand, but nothing happens. He flexes his toes. He takes a deep breath. He shouts, but it doesn’t do a single thing. Nothing moves. He’s lying in a coffin with his own corpse, and he can’t do a single damn thing about it. His body might as well be another piece of furniture.

Fifteen minutes later, Steve’s lying on the floor next to his cryochamber, shivering and feeling deeply disturbed. So it’s quite a shock when Tony walks into the room in the armour, the faceplate and gauntlets retracted.

He stares at Steve’s body for a long time, motionless, expressionless. Then he moves over to the little bank of computers on the side, and begins fiddling with the controls there. He messes around with the computer for about half an hour, during which Steve grumbles at him for wasting time, sings him an old trench song, and tries to touch Tony again. He isn’t expecting it to do anything. It doesn’t seem like it does.

Eventually, Tony seems to exhaust his options. He closes whatever programs he’d opened up. He takes ten seconds to press his palm to the cold glass above Steve’s face. Then he suits up and leaves the room with as little preamble as he arrived.

From then on, every once in a while—usually late at night when Steve knows that he’s thinking about drinking—Tony goes and visits Steve’s body. Every time, Tony checks the various monitors they’ve got him hooked up to, in case he wakes up or shows signs of improvement, probably. He does some things on the computer that Steve doesn’t understand, always frowning at the results of his fiddling. So far, he’d guess, there’s been no change.

Sometimes, Tony talks to him, which is deeply surreal. In the beginning, Steve had to fight the urge to talk back to him. He’d ranted and raved at Tony. He’d shouted in his face. He’d tried running full tilt away from his body, then shaking him as soon as he’s snapped back to his side. So far, nothing’s worked. It’s been nearly two months, now, that Steve’s been dead, and he’s beginning to get nervous. He doesn’t want to think about being stuck like this forever, but it’s hard to be optimistic under the circumstances. He thinks he can be forgiven for struggling a little emotionally when he’s forced to watch Tony mourn him, day in, day out. The depression and addiction has always been painful to experience as someone who loves Tony, but it’s doubly hard now, when Steve knows he’s partially responsible for it. When all he can do is watch, and say nothing.

Eventually, Maria Hill appears at the door, about seven minutes into Tony’s usual checks on Steve’s status logs. She leans against the wall for a long time, not speaking, and Tony doesn’t bother to acknowledge her. Finally, she clears her throat, just once.

“This isn’t healthy,” she tells him.

Steve winces, because that’s maybe the most useless thing she could have said to Tony.

“Mind your own business, Hill.”

Maria frowns. She crosses her arms over her chest. “You know, once upon a time, your business was my business.”

“And?” Tony is very carefully not looking away from the monitors. They’re on treacherous ground. Steve can’t help but put a hand on the nape of Tony’s neck. It’s still the one spot Steve can reach when he’s in the armour, and for a moment it seems like Tony relaxes into it: boneless, trusting, like Steve’s used to.

Then Tony blinks, mechanically, exactly once. It’s an expression Steve remembers from when Tony had Extremis: a visual marker of Tony’s brain saying _processing, please hold_. He frowns, and turns around to face Maria, as if to check that she’s still there.

If Maria notices his strange behaviour, she doesn’t comment on it. She’s looking at Steve’s body, her face expressionless. Blank, almost. “You don’t remember the last time you stood vigil over his dead body.”

“Do you?” Tony asks, mildly curious. It’s an act, but Maria lets him get away with it. It’s the closest thing she has to kindness. “Were you there?”

Maria rolls her eyes. “No, but I’m just saying, you’ve been here before and it’s never been good for you. Go home, Stark.”

Tony hums in thought. “Is there security footage?” he asks.

“You controlled the cameras of every room you were in while you had Extremis.”

“That’s not an answer,” Tony sings, and Maria sighs.

“Why? You wanna watch past you beat himself up over Steve’s last death while current you beats yourself up over this one?”

The absolute farce of the situation does not elude anyone in the room. Even Tony cracks a small smile.

“Fair,” he says, and Maria rolls her eyes.

“Go home, Stark. Don’t make me restrict your access to this room.”

“You couldn’t keep me out of here if you got every code-wrangling gopher SHIELD employs from here to Hokkaido on the job,” Tony tells her. His confidence would be obnoxious if he sounded less exhausted when he said it. As it is, he mostly just comes off as resigned and sad.

“I wouldn’t try to keep you out with a retina scanner,” Maria scoffs. “But I _could_ call Danvers the next time you show up here at 4am.”

Tony winces.

“Uh huh. Go. Home. This is the last damn time I’m gonna tell you, Stark.”

Tony sighs. He closes out of the various windows on the monitor. “You’re a cruel woman,” he tells her.

Maria smiles thinly at him. “That’s why we get on.”

\--

Steve counts out twenty minutes after Tony’s left before trying to shift back to his side, and every minute is excruciating. Because he’s sure, he is absolutely, 100% positive, that he touched Tony that time. He touched Tony without having to make himself sick over it. He hadn’t had to stretch the limits of whatever spell keeps him tied to Tony. He’d just put a hand on his neck, to try to comfort him, and he did. He’s sure that Tony relaxed into his hand. He remembers the feeling of Tony’s warm skin pressed against his, the way the tight tendons of his neck went lax under Steve’s fingers. He knows the sensation so well he can feel the echo of it, tingling down to his wrist like a live wire.

Pushing through the fathomless in-between place to get to Tony feels easier this time, although that might be the giddiness bubbling under his skin. He comes back to himself in Tony’s bathroom, and he has a brief moment of disorientation, a flush of embarrassment at the flash of bare skin.

He’s tried to stay on the other side of the door when Tony’s in the bathroom, but the jacuzzi tub is too far from the door. Steve’s been dreading the day that Tony uses it, because then there will be nowhere to go. He’ll just have to stand there, and watch Tony, and he can imagine it, can’t he? Tony easing in with a soft groan to lie back in the hot water, his olive skin dotted with moisture and-

Well.

Steve clears his throat and glances around. Tony, thankfully, is not in any sort of compromising position. His shirt’s off. He’s standing at the sink, his torso twisted around as he tries to see the back of his own neck. He touches the skin there, frowning, and Steve reaches out to try and meet his fingers, to touch the place where his hand was. This time, his hand pushes straight through, fingers dipping under Tony’s skin.

“What is happening?” Tony murmurs, and Steve perks up. He concentrates, willing his hand solid, and tries to touch Tony again. To brush a hand over his shoulder, or ruffle his hair. But as Tony goes through his nightly ablutions, Steve fails, and fails, and fails again. Every time, his hand misses its mark.

“Why isn’t this working?” Steve grumbles. He crosses his hands over his chest, watching as Tony flosses his teeth. Frustration wells up inside him, something he’s been trying desperately to keep at bay these past few months. He reaches out to touch Tony’s back, to cup the wing of one shoulder blade, and instead passes his hand right through where Tony’s heart should be.

Tony, predictably, doesn’t notice. He stares at his reflection in the mirror. He looks tired, dark bags welling up under his thick lashes. Tony’s got movie star eyes, something Steve has always been just a little bit fascinated by. Steve knows he can’t pull off sultry or brooding the way Tony can, and he has the strangest urge to cup Tony’s face and run his thumb over the edge of them: let the gentle, butterfly-wing’s sensation of them skim over his skin.

Tony turns, then, and Steve stumbles back, because he’d been so close. Tony’s face is right there, and Steve is having the kind of thoughts he thought he’d buried a long time ago. His mind is always a little dangerous around Tony. Steve has always prided himself on his self-control, but it’s hard, seeing Tony at his most vulnerable like this. He’s practically been living in Tony’s pocket, and it’s giving his traitorous brain the worst kind of thoughts. Thoughts that he knows are out of bounds, when he’s already violating Tony’s privacy so deeply like this. Thoughts he knows he doesn’t deserve to have, when he’d stood over Tony’s body and held the shield above Tony’s bloody face, and Tony had said-

Steve closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. There’s nothing satisfying in it, because he doesn’t really have lungs. He isn’t really here at all.

A familiar tug breaks Steve out of his self-deprecating reverie, and he fights it a little, because that’s how he’s had the most success. He doesn’t know what else to do. He holds his ground, fingers reaching out ineffectually to try to grasp the bathroom counter and going right through.

“Come on, Avenger,” he mutters, his head dipping towards his chest as a wave of nausea sweeps over him. “Come on.”

The sensation lessens, and Steve frowns. That’s never happened before.

“Hello?”

Steve lifts his head. There, in the doorway, Tony is staring right at him. The expression on his face is one Steve hasn’t seen before, even in over a decade of friendship. Tony looks…haunted, is really the only word Steve might use to describe it. He looks like he’s seen a ghost.

“Tony?”

Tony opens his mouth, then closes it again. He takes a shaking breath, like he’s bracing himself.

“Steve?” he whispers.

“Tony,” Steve gasps. He rushes closer to him, takes Tony’s face in his hands. To do what, he doesn’t know, and for a moment, he can feel it again: Tony’s skin under his fingers, warm and _living_. Tony’s eyes blow wide, pupils shrinking in fear, and Steve presses his forehead to Tony’s. “Tony, _Tony_ , please. _Please_.” He doesn’t even know what he’s begging for.

“Steve?” Tony says again, voice wrecked, and Steve nods against his face. “What-”

“It’s me,” he says. “Tony, can you hear me?”

A single tear trickles down Tony’s face. Steve brushes his thumb over Tony’s cheek to wipe it away, but he can’t. He can’t, and then he’s not touching Tony anymore. His hands can’t reach Tony’s skin. His forehead tingles where their skin met for two beautiful seconds, and Steve’s crying, too, now, because he was so close. He was so, so close.

“Oh fuck,” Tony whispers. He stumbles back, sits down heavily on the edge of his bed. And then he’s sobbing: big, great heaves of it, quiet and desperate. He’s crying like Steve hasn’t seen him since he gave up drinking, like every sob is taking something precious and necessary from him.

“Tony,” Steve says again. He sits next to Tony on the bed, curling his body around Tony as best he can without touching him. He can’t bear to have his hand pass through Tony right now. “Tony…”

“Boss, do you want me to call someone? Carol? Or Rhodey?”

“No,” Tony gasps, waving a hand. “No, Fri, don’t.” He hitches another sob. “Don’t…I just. I need to sleep.”

“Boss, I really think you should call someone.”

“No!” Tony shouts, and Steve flinches back at the force of it. “No one can see me like this. I’m- I’m fucking, I’m going crazy. I’m losing my mind. I just need to sleep.”

“Tony, _no_ ,” Steve tells him. His hand hovers over Tony’s shoulder, desperate and ineffectual. “I’m here, Tony. I’m right here.”

Tony, predictably, doesn’t hear him. Instead he crawls up the bed, curling into a ball in the middle, crying like a child. It’s maybe the worst thing Steve’s seen, and Steve has seen a lot of horrible things in his day. Tony’s shaking, sobbing body paints a shattering picture of abject misery, and Steve is sick and tired of being helpless.

“Fuck this,” Steve says, surprising himself with the anger in it. He takes a deep breath. He steels himself.

Then he turns, and runs straight through the closest window.

Steve’s jumped off of a lot of tall things, and not even always with someone to catch him. Usually Tony is the one who rushes to meet him mid-air, muttering about Steve’s bull-headed recklessness. He’d thought he was used to it, that nothing could phase him. But it’s strange, falling without the wind whipping against him. He feels weightless, almost. Below him, the city is spread out in a dot matrix of glowing lights. Little cars shuttle back and forth like fireflies, quickly growing larger. The street is nearly upon him.

Steve closes his eyes.

The snap is the most painful he’s ever experienced. He feels like his body’s been wrenched apart into individual molecules and pulled back together again. He’s in so much pain he doesn’t know which way is up, but he reaches out a blind, desperate hand and feels around, praying for something solid. Skin. Warm skin.

He curls himself around Tony’s body, shaking like a leaf, and Tony leans into him with a wrecked sound that Steve feels in his very bones. But he can feel it, is the thing. He can feel Tony’s hands fumbling along his cheekbones, tracing his jaw, his nose, his gasping mouth.

The last thing he hears before he loses consciousness is the sound of Tony whispering his name: over and over again, soft and reverent, like he’s counting beads on a rosary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Mary Oliver's ["In Blackwater Woods"](https://wordsfortheyear.com/2014/03/28/in-blackwater-woods-by-mary-oliver/)


	4. come to me in dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: some intense discussion of homophobia, WWII, the AIDS crisis, internalised homophobia, statutory r*pe
> 
> Stay safe kiddos.

> christ but they're few  
>   
> all(beyond win  
> or lose)good true  
> beautiful things
> 
> – E. E. Cummings, “Untitled” or alternatively “#33”

Tony had dressed in one of his beautiful suits for their night out. Something like sharkskin, with a gentle gleam that made Steve want to brush his fingers over the fabric. Then he remembers that he can, and he slings an arm around Tony’s shoulders. When Tony leans into him, his blood sings.

 _Home_ , he thinks. _I’m home._

They’d gotten dinner at Jack’s Wife Frieda, then cannoli at Pasticceria Rocco. Tony had long held that they were the best in the city, and Steve couldn’t disagree. Their server, bless him, had taken one look at the two of them and set them up in the back, around the corner and up against the brick wall. It was a table well away from the prying eyes of the rest of the customers. There, Tony could speak freely about the recent upgrades to the armour, about MJ’s most recent photoshoot with Vogue Italia, about the new rollout of the StarkPads that was set for next week but the specs were driving him crazy. He looked so happy, and Steve had grinned and let him talk himself out, sipping at his coffee and demolishing an entire plate of cream puffs, one delicious, buttery-sweet bite after another.

“Sorry,” Tony said, halfway through. He grinned at Steve, a little bashful. “It’s been a while since we did this. I’m talking your ear off.”

Steve shook his head at him. “Go on. I’m happy to listen.”

Tony smiled into his espresso. Then, miraculously, he took Steve at his word, and kept on going.

So here they are, wandering out of the IFC, Tony pressed into the curve of Steve’s body and talking animatedly with his hands. Steve doesn’t want the night to end yet. He feels five years lighter, like Civil War never happened and he and Tony have only ever been best friends. Like he’s just found out that his two best friends are really the same, single, amazing man. Like for the first time, he can reach out and touch Iron Man and find flesh: Tony, warm and living under his heavy, calloused hands.

Tony’s looking up at him with a little glimmer in his eye, like he knows something Steve doesn’t. Steve can’t help but grin helplessly down at him.

“Where’s your head at, Winghead?”

Steve shrugs. He glances across the street at the basketball court tucked into the corner, then sighs, because of course he doesn’t have…

“Oh,” Steve says.

“What?”

Steve grins, tugging Tony across the street. Tony lets himself be led, watching Steve with an indulgent expression. Steve stops under the big tree that overhangs the park, and points up.

“Wanna fly up, or should I climb?”

Tony raises his eyebrows at him. “Are you serious?”

“Sure I am. What, out of practice?”

“Oh, no,” Tony says, laughing. He shakes his head. “I am not falling for that. I’m wearing dress shoes.”

“And whose choice was that?” Steve asks mildly. He glances around, then circles back to the trash can on the corner. He peers down into the bin, then smiles and rolls up his sleeves. “Nice.”

“Steve, if you think I’m gonna play one-on-one after you’ve stuck your hand inside a New York City trashcan-”

“You’ve touched worse,” Steve says. He crumples up the empty soda can he’d found into a little disc, then presents it proudly to Tony.

Tony stares at him, his lips pressed tightly together to disguise the smile Steve knows is hiding there. He puts his hands on his waist and tilts his head back to look at the basketball tucked neatly between the highest branches.

“What’s the wager?” he asks, and Steve grins at him.

“If I get it out with this in five tries, you’ve gotta play me.”

“That’s aluminium. The tree is easily twenty feet tall, and there’s a 12 mph wind running down this street.”

“Think I can’t do it? Put your money where your mouth is, Shellhead.”

“If it was just money, I’d bet.”

Steve waits, still smiling. He watches the way the passing headlights shimmer over Tony’s hair, lighting up the curls in a ripple wave. It almost looks like silk, and Steve desperately wants to ruffle it, but he knows how vain Tony can be about such things.

“First try.”

“Three.”

Tony snorts. “Don’t think I don’t know you were aiming for three all along. You’re not a good negotiator.”

Steve raises his eyebrows, flipping the little tin disc over his fingers. “That’s ‘cause I usually don’t bother. Yes or no, Tony?”

Tony’s mouth twitches. His eyes crinkle with warmth, and Steve can’t help but move a little closer to him. Tony’s eyes are dark, gleaming liquid pools in the yellow streetlight, and there are clichés, he knows, about this sort of thing. Fathomless eyes. Falling. Steve wets his lips, mouth suddenly dry.

Tony looks away, and Steve watches the motion of his throat as he swallows. He tilts his head back to look at the starless sky.

“Fine,” he says. Then he laughs: a short, sharp bark of it. “Go on, then.”

Steve takes a deep breath. He stares up at the basketball, then walks around the tree, looking at where the branches are putting pressure against the skin of it, where force would have to be applied to knock it loose. Then he takes a few steps back, pulls his arm back, and lets the soda can fly.

The little tin disc hits the basketball and crumples a bit on impact, and the ball rocks, rolling up onto the edge of the branch, before falling back into place.

Steve frowns.

“Inferior materials,” Tony tells him, smug as a cat. “Not quite the calibre you’re used to, hm Captain?”

Steve huffs a laugh. “So fix it, then,” he tells him, jogging over to where the disc fell. The edge is dented, and he does his best to smooth it out with his fingers before offering it to Tony.

Tony wrinkles his nose at him. “That was in the trash. It’s got other people’s spit in it.”

Steve raises his eyebrows at him, and manfully does not make the obvious joke. Tony stares at him, then rolls his eyes, rocking back on his heels. “Really, Steve?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Steve says, not quite managing to hide the wicked smirk threatening to overtake his very best butter wouldn’t melt expression.

Tony bumps him with a shoulder. “Jerk.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. He just offers Tony the disc again.

“Put a curve in it.”

Steve glances over at him, and the smile wins the battle. His eyes crinkle at the corners. “Yeah?”

Tony pushes his wrist away, tilting his nose up snobbishly. “And put the part with the tab on the convex side. Frisbees have ridges on the top to induce a turbulent boundary layer. It reduces drag on the disc. You want the bottom to be the smooth underside of the can.”

“Is that why the shield has ridges on it?” Steve asks, surprised. Years and years later, and he’s still learning new things from Tony every day.

“Yes.”

Steve had honestly always thought those were just to make it look nice. “Wow.”

“Come on, Steve. We haven’t got all night.”

“Not like you sleep,” Steve counters. But he turns the little disc over, putting a gentle curve in it to match the shape of his shield, and making sure the bottom of it is nice and smooth. “I almost got it last time.”

“Promises, promises.”

Steve narrows his eyes at his target. He hefts his makeshift weapon in his hand. Then he lets fly, really putting his back into it.

The disc hits the basketball with a much more satisfying sound this time, and the ball pops up onto one of the branches it was wedged into. It rolls leisurely along for a breathless second, and then it’s falling. Steve bounds forward to catch it, then turns around and holds it aloft to show Tony, unaccountably proud of himself.

“Hey, we did it!”

“You’re a dork,” Tony informs him, but he’s smiling. He shakes his head at Steve’s victorious pose. “Alright, fine. You win.”

“Yup,” Steve says happily. “Come on.”

He drags Tony onto the empty court. The street is dark. It’s half gone midnight on Wednesday. The foot traffic is as minimal as it can get in Lower Manhattan, and Steve is deeply grateful for it, because he doesn’t want to share this moment with anyone. He watches Tony strip out of his suit jacket and hang it over a bench. He removes his cufflinks, tucks them into the inside pocket of his suit. He rolls his sleeves up to his elbows.

“Need a handicap?” Steve asks, and Tony sneers at him.

“Let’s have it, old man.”

Twenty minutes in, Steve is up by three and overheating in his clothes. He peels his sweater off and tosses it onto the bench with Tony’s suit jacket, rolling his own sleeves up. Tony wipes the back of his hand over his mouth. Sweat beads at his temples, and Steve grins at him, spinning the ball on one finger.

“Not bad.”

“You’re going easy on me,” Tony accuses, which is, well. True.

“You don’t have Extremis anymore.”

Tony rolls his eyes. Then he glances down at his shoes, frowning. “These are really the worst to do this in,” he mutters. He leans down, ostensibly to fix one of the laces which has gone a little loose.

Movement flickers at the corner of Steve’s eye. Strange, like nothing he’s ever seen before. Like a shadow made living. Then, pain. A sharp sting, like a bug bite. He moves to slap idly at it, but then, it happens: the sharp slice of a blade. It bites into his throat, and he reaches an instinctive hand up, knocking an elbow back into where an assailant wound be, but there’s nothing. There’s nothing there. His hands grasp empty air as something slices his throat open, cuts through his trachea before he can even make a sound. He’s falling back before Tony even notices anything is wrong, and then he’s on his back, and he can feel the blood splashing onto the court next to his head.

 _Arterial spray_ , he thinks, wildly.

“Steve?”

Tony. Oh, Tony. Tony’s warm hand wrapped around his throat, trying to stem the bleeding. Tony shaking, fumbling for his phone, running back to pull it out of his suit jacket while Steve puts his hands on his own throat, trying to keep the pressure.

Tony’s hands pressing his beautiful grey suit to Steve’s neck, then giving up. Tony’s voice in his ear, shouting into the Avengers emergency line. Tony’s fingers pressed tight against Steve’s pulse as his blood leaks steadily from his body.

“No. God, _no_.”

Steve startles awake with a shout, his fingers reaching up to touch his own neck. Of course, he can’t really feel his own skin that well. He can’t touch anything like this.

Tony is lying next to him in bed. He’d clearly cried himself to sleep, and Steve stares down at his face. He reaches a trembling hand out to touch, his fingertips dipping into the bags beneath Tony’s eyes, through, to the bone. All he can feel is the faintest sense of warmth.

He flops onto his back, starfish, and stares at the ceiling.

 _God,_ he thinks, _please, tell me what I should do._

He stares at the ceiling until the sun rises. Then he turns, and watches the breath rise and fall in Tony’s chest. The sun slips over his skin like a warm blanket, painting the lines and curves of his musculature in gold and shadow. With every breath, his obliques shift: invisible, visible, and back again. Steve reaches a hand out to touch, then sighs. He lets it fall back to the bedsheets.

He doesn’t think he’ll be sleeping for a while.

\--

Tony rolls out of bed sometime around noon, and spends a good twenty minutes in the shower. Steve sits on the floor outside of the bathroom, waiting, and tries to puzzle out what the hell the trick is to interacting with the world around him. He doesn’t fall through the floors, but he can go through windows. Sometimes, he can lean against tables or counters. Sometimes, his hands go right through.

Usually, he touches inanimate objects without thinking. It’s when he’s trying that he can’t quite manage it, and he doesn’t understand why that would be true. He can’t figure out touching Tony at all. He’d think it was when his emotions were running high, but he’d tried to touch Tony in the car at his funeral, and he’d been plenty upset then. He has better success, he thinks, when he’s trying to comfort Tony in some way. But then, he’d touched Tony’s neck to catch himself in the cemetery.

But no, that wasn’t it, was it? He’d been so out of it he’d touched him without thinking, expecting to be able to catch himself on Tony.

“How the hell am I supposed to touch him without thinking about it?” Steve grumbles to himself. “What kinda good does that do me?”

He rests his head on his bent wrists, staring down at the floor between his knees. In the bathroom, he can hear Tony cleaning up his goatee, brushing his teeth, gargling. Finally, he steps out of the bathroom, and Steve keeps his eyes on the carpet. He knows well enough by now that it’s very likely that Tony isn’t wearing any clothes.

“If you’re there, Steve, you’ve been very naughty,” Tony says, and Steve’s head snaps up to look at him. Tony, true to Steve’s predictions, is entirely naked as he roots around in his drawer for a pair of briefs. “Haunting me, huh? Why not go bug Stephen? He’s the ghost guy.”

“I tried,” Steve tells him, despite himself. He knows he’s wasting his time answering, but it feels more cruel not to reply when Tony’s so clearly shaken up.

“But then, I guess I was the one who let you die.”

“Tony,” Steve barks, pushing himself to his feet. Then he thinks better of it, turning around, because Tony’s bent over to put on his briefs.

“Y’know, when I said you were going to haunt me, I didn’t mean it this literally.”

Steve closes his eyes.

“Or, maybe I’m crazy, and I hadn’t slept in fifty seven hours, and I’m talking to-” Tony cuts himself off, his voice breaking. Steve sucks in an unsteady breath. “Fuck.”

Tony finishes dressing in silence. It hurts, but Steve doesn’t know what else to do. Tony’s never been able to hear him, even when they were touching. He’s pretty sure Tony hadn’t really been able to see him, either, or he wouldn’t have asked. Maybe a shadow, or an outline. A distortion in the air. Not enough for Tony to look at him and know who he was without asking.

Steve follows Tony down to the communal kitchen. Peter’s there, shovelling a too-big bite of waffle into his face, and Tony spares him a wave as he beelines for the coffee pot.

“Hey, Tony. You wake up late too?”

Tony shrugs.

“I was up late chasing Croc through the sewers,” Peter continues, in typical Peter fashion, without really waiting for a response. “The suit smells like ass. Didn’t wanna go home. So I came here for decon. Want a waffle?”

Tony eyes him over his coffee mug, leaning back against the counter. He tilts his head to the side.

“You got any experience with ghosts?”

Peter hmms in thought, taking the non sequitur with ease. “Maybe? Vampires. Multidimensional demons. Demigods. Ghosts? _Have_ I ever met a ghost?” He shrugs, waving his waffle. “Don’t think so? But hey, I’m sure somebody has. The soul stone exists. Have you asked Strange?”

Tony shakes his head. “Just curious,” he says. He reaches over and snags a waffle, folding it in half like a pizza and tipping it towards his mouth to catch the excess syrup. Steve watches him with something curling slow and dizzying in his non-existent stomach.

“Is this about Cap?”

Tony blinks. He chews his mouthful of waffle, then swallows it very deliberately.

“Excuse me?”

Peter shifts on his chair, an uncomfortable expression overtaking his face. “Sorry. Just…I can’t help but feel like he’s not really dead, y’know? Like not forever. And I know you think so too.”

Tony shakes his head, lips pressed into a thin line. Syrup trips over his fingers and down his wrist, and he lets out a small curse. His tongue catches the drip, following it up over his fingers. He pushes the last of the waffle into his mouth, sucking his fingers clean, and Steve’s mouth is so, so dry.

“Wow.”

Tony blinks, his eyes tilting over to where Peter’s perched at the island. Steve can’t bear to tear his eyes away from Tony. He’s still got two fingers in his mouth. But whatever Tony sees there makes his eyes crinkle. He looks a little smug, and Steve can imagine exactly what Peter’s face is doing. MJ or not, Steve’s seen him flirting with Wade.

“Don’t mind me.”

Mercifully, Tony turns around to wash his hands in the kitchen sink. Steve glances over at Peter, who’s staring into his plate like it holds the secret of the universe in it. He looks…sad.

“Can I ask a dumb, insensitive question?”

Tony laughs, turning back around and picking up his coffee again. He rubs a tired hand over his eyes. “Sure, Peter. Ask away.”

“Why didn’t you and Cap ever...” Tony stills, unnatural and silent. Peter flips his fork over his knuckles in a small display of acrobatics that is deeply, uniquely Spiderman. He takes a deep breath, tries again. “I mean, after, when things had been fixed up, and Agent 13 and him had broken up, a lot of us thought, maybe.”

Steve is surprised to hear this question from Peter. From some of the newer, less familiar heroes, sure. But Peter knows it’s not like that-

“You know the timing was never right,” Tony sighs, which. Which, is not what Steve would have said at all. It’s not what he would have thought Tony would say. He would-

“Oh, God,” he says, suddenly, and he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to hear this. Surely, surely he can be spared this-

“Steve was so dedicated to the whole, Victorian pining from afar thing,” Tony jokes, but there’s no humour in it, and _that isn’t true_. It isn’t. “I never could bear to spoil his fun.”

“I never thought Cap was homophobic,” Peter says carefully.

“Because I’m not!” Steve bursts out, but of course, no one can hear him.

Tony just waves a hand. “It’s not that,” he says. “Ah, I forget how young you are.”

“Hey,” Peter says, but there’s not much in the protest. Tony smiles at him, small and indulgent.

“I lived through the AIDS crisis,” Tony says bluntly. “The stakes were higher even just a few years ago. Steve likes women well enough. He wanted a family. It’s easier, for some men, to pretend like that’s all there is. Especially when you’re a public figure.”

“Tony,” Steve says, gaping at him. “Is that really what you think of me?”

“You’re out,” Peter says stubbornly, but Tony shakes his head.

“I was _outed_ ,” he says, “which is different.”

By his own ex-lover, Steve knows. The thought of Tiberius Stone’s oleaginous, grinning face makes his fists clench.

“I didn’t know that,” Peter says, frowning. “Weren’t you a kid?”

“Oh please. I was a doe-eyed underage twink when I showed up at a college full of sexually repressed nerds. It was a miracle my virginity lasted 48 hours.”

Peter blinks, poleaxed. It’s a reaction that Steve is deeply grateful for, because he doesn’t know what else to do with his body, his hands, as he listens to the words coming out of Tony’s mouth: one nightmare after another, endless, like a magician’s colourful scarf. “Okay, aside from that horrifying two-sentence persuasive essay on why Title IX is an important piece of legislation-”

“Pot n’ kettle, Spidey. Or was it another web-slinging hero who started at the ripe young age of 15?”

“That’s totally different-!” Peter begins, but Tony waves a lazy hand at him.

“Besides, I wasn’t born in 1920.” He shrugs. “I don’t think Steve even really consciously knew what he was doing, to tell you the truth.”

Steve sits down hard on the kitchen floor, because this is…this is maybe the worst thing that’s happened to him since he’s died. Worse than his funeral, worse than the pain of jumping out of Tony’s window and plummeting 90 stories to the pavement. He feels like he’s been hit in the chest by the Hulk.

“Men touched each other a lot more before World War II,” Tony continues, because Steve is in hell.

 _This is Hell_ , he thinks. _All this time, I’ve been in Hell._

“It was actually World War II that changed the conception of masculinity into the terrifying, strict thing it became in the 50’s. Even homosexual contact was actually more widely accepted in some ways, although of course it was a behaviour and not an identity. Men-who-have-sex-with-men, not homosexual. There’s some really great books about queer history you should check out, both in New York and in Germany. _Gay New York_ is a good one. There was a major cultural revolution happening in Berlin right before the rise of the Reich. A bunch of prominent leftist thinkers, openly gay poets and theologians. Of course, then the Nazis showed up and murdered every single one of them, so.”

“Yikes,” Peter mutters, which, yes. Yes, that is the correct response.

“Sorry,” Tony says, waving a hand. “I digress. My point is, Steve probably didn’t even know he was flirting.”

“I…” Steve tries, then stops. There are so many things wrong with Tony’s assessment he doesn’t even know where to begin. No one can even hear him, which he is, for once, desperately glad of. He feels like he’s coming apart.

“Anyway, he and Sharon would have worked it out eventually.” Tony shrugs, but Peter looks sceptical. He pushes the last of his waffles around his plate, his jaw set a that way that Steve knows intimately from looking at his own face in the mirror.

“Cap had to know,” he says.

Tony sighs. “Peter…”

“No,” Peter says, frowning up at Tony. “We all saw it. You would have let him kill you. I know you don’t remember, but I do. I was there, on both sides. You made some terrible choices, I’m not disputing that. You did some really truly reprehensible things. But Tony… You thought that maybe he could end it, because you knew you couldn’t. You wanted to compromise, and he hit you with the EMP. You asked him to kill you, so you’d stop fighting. You _never revoked his override codes_. How could he not know you loved him?”

Steve presses his palms to his eyes, and it isn’t satisfying at all. He can’t get the pressure he wants. He thought he’d cried himself out last night, but here he is again: crying into his hands, sitting on the floor, while the world goes on without him. Merciless.

“People see what they want to see in the people around them,” Tony says. It’s quiet, just enough for Peter and Steve to hear him. “Steve always saw the best in people.”

“Loving him doesn’t make you _bad_ ,” Peter says, horrified, and Tony waves a lazy hand at him. It’s completely false, and everything about this is making Steve want to scream.

“A decade,” he whispers. “Over a decade. _Years_ , Tony, and you- you-”

“Are _you_ homophobic?” Peter asks, sounding incensed now, and Tony laughs. A bright, hysterical peal that scrapes over Steve’s nerves with all the gentleness of a cheese grater.

“I’ve been out since 1987,” Tony tells him, rolling his eyes. “I’m a mess. You know it. Everyone knows it. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a whore.”

Steve flinches bodily at the word. He presses trembling fingers to his mouth to stem all the things he wants to shout, his heart breaking in his chest, because it’s no use. This is his punishment for his cowardice. This is his punishment for not meeting Tony halfway. This is exactly what he deserves.

Tony spreads his hands. “It’s a miracle Steve was my friend for so long.”

“He’d fight you again for saying that,” Peter says, and Steve shouts “I would” in furious agreement. “You know Cap loved you.”

Tony huffs. All the fight goes out of him. “What do you want me to do about it now?” he asks. His voice is shaking. He looks completely wrung dry, and Steve reaches a hand out, and presses two shaking fingers to the jutting ankle bone beneath the hem of Tony’s pants. And there, beneath his fingertips: warm, papery thin skin.

Touch. Tap. Touch. Tap.

Tony stiffens. His eyes dart down to the kitchen floor, to where Steve is touching his ankle.

Tap.

Tap tap tap.

Touch. Tap. Touch.

“Oh,” Tony says. He lets out a shaky breath, and Steve wraps his hand around Tony’s ankle. They’re incongruously delicate, Tony’s ankles. Slender and fine boned. He rubs a careful thumb over the jutting bone where he’d left his message.

“Ghosts,” Peter says weakly, and both Steve and Tony’s eyes snap to him. Steve’s fingers slip through Tony’s skin, once again unable to touch.

“Peter?” Tony says, eagerness lurking under his careful tone. “Peter, did you see something?”

Peter frowns. He lifts a hand, rocks it back and forth. “I… _sensed_ ,” he says, slowly. “Something? Maybe? It was, like, just a flash of weird.” Peter wriggles his fingers by his temples meaningfully, and Tony sucks in a breath. Then he, too, slides down the cabinets, and sits heavily on the floor.

“Oh my god,” he mouths, more breath than voice. “Oh my god, I thought I was going crazy.”

Peter, in typical Peter fashion, crawls right over the kitchen island and back down the other side. He crouches by Tony’s splayed legs, his head swaying back and forth as he surveys the kitchen. Steve’s too exhausted to try the rubber band method right now, so he settles for trying ineffectually to rub a comforting hand over Tony’s shin.

“It’s gone,” Peter says, after a few tense moments. Tony lets out a heavy breath. “You think it’s Steve.”

“I know it’s Steve,” Tony corrects him, and Peter quirks a sceptical eyebrow.

“How? Could be a lot of things. Could be a magic user fucking with you. Could be someone who’s got powers like Kitty. Could be-”

“Last night, I was able to touch him back for the first time,” Tony says. His throat is clogged with unshed tears, and God, but Steve wants everyone to be done crying. He’s cried enough. Everyone has cried enough. “I felt his face. It was Steve’s face. I know it’s Steve. I know-…I know.”

“And just now?” Peter says, and Tony lets loose a shaky laugh.

“He called me a jerk. If that’s not Steve, I don’t know what is.”

Peter’s brows fly up into his messy hair. “You heard him?”

Tony shakes his head. He reaches out and taps the same pattern Steve had onto the back of Peter’s hand.

Peter blinks. “ _Railroad_ Morse?”

“He’s a soldier and a tactician.”

“A ghost called you a jerk in American Morse code,” Peter says flatly. This his face changes, contorting through guilt, horror, and chagrin. “Oh, God. And we were just…”

“He seems to be attached to me,” Tony muses, and Steve can feel hope building up in him again. “I think…” He touches his chest, right above where the starburst scar Steve knows well sits. “I think he’s tied to me. I think he can’t leave.”

“Uh huh,” Peter says, and Tony blinks up at him.

“What?”

“I’m just saying, sounds like magic. Soulmates, true love’s kiss, something-”

“ _Peter_ -”

“Well, have you tried that?”

Tony stops short. He frowns. “No.”

“Then you should,” Peter says, rocking back onto his heels. “What’s the harm?”

“Uh, necrophilia for one-”

“I’m not telling you to _fuck_ his _dead body_ , Jesus, just kiss him-”

“Peter!”

Peter folds his arms over his chest and looks down at Tony. “You know, you owe me.”

Tony glares back at him. “This is how you wanna cash in?”

“No, because this is for you, and so you’ll still owe me after you do it.”

Tony winces. “Peter…” He sighs. “Maria already softbanned me from visiting. Said something about it being unhealthy.”

“Then I guess we’ve got some explaining to do, huh?”

The expression that overtakes Tony’s face is curious, to Steve. Surprise, maybe. He looks up into Peter’s stubborn face with a small smile that’s equal parts trepidation and hope.

“You’d help me?” Tony asks.

Peter rolls his eyes. Then he unfolds himself with all the ease expected of Spiderman, and holds out a hand to Tony.

“You’re your own worst enemy, Tony,” Peter says. “Now stop being such a dramatic asshole, and let’s go. I’m free until three. If you fly us over, we can be in and out of the Triskelion with plenty of time to spare.” And then, under his breath, “Fuck, I just came for the banging cast iron waffle maker. This is why I don’t hang out here. Crazy shit, every time…”

Tony slaps his hand into Peter’s and lets himself be pulled up. “This is a dumb idea.”

“One of your villains is a literal dragon.”

Tony bites his lip, because he doesn’t have a comeback for that one.

“Yeah. Come on, Tin Man; let’s go try to wake Sleeping Beauty.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Christina Rossetti's ["Echo"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50289/echo-56d22d3f77136)


	5. silence is the blood whose flesh is singing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI things get a little #spicy between Peter and Stephen re: Civil War here. Once again, character views are not my own. Also, Stephen is kind of a dick here, sorry. I feel like I made him a little too nice in my last Stephen fic, and here he's a little too mean... .___. He's a hard man to write when I really only know him from the brief interactions he's had w/ Tony lmao. Sorry guys.
> 
> Chapter title is from E. E. Cummings, [“Enter No” or alternatively “#67”](http://www.angelfire.com/indie/beladonna/eecummings.html) (yes, again lol)

> Here’s a fact: Some people want to live more  
> Than others do.
> 
> – Sherman Alexie, “Survivorman”

Steve wishes he could have been there to see Peter and Tony explain themselves to Maria, but he still hasn’t figured out a way to accompany Tony while he’s flying without hurting himself. Instead, he’s forced to pace circles around his own lifeless body, his eyes trained on the door. It feels like aeons before it finally hisses open, and Steve bounces awkwardly on his toes as the three of them enter the room. Now that Tony’s here, he’s not sure how he feels about this. Should he get into his body? The very idea of it sends heat scorching over his cheeks, down his throat to his chest. He’s always been a horrible blusher, intangibility or no.

“The cryochamber is hermetically sealed, and for good reason,” Tony says. “Are we sure this is a good idea?”

“Are you asking me?” Maria says flatly, and Steve chuckles despite himself. “This was your idea.”

“It’s worth a try,” Peter says stubbornly, and Tony sighs.

“What if changing what’s been up ‘til now a stable ecosystem negatively affects his condition?”

“Then he’ll still be dead.”

“Spidey!”

“What?”

“Alright,” Maria says, shaking her head. She steps between the two men, and types her login into the computer. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it. Tony, get ready. This has gotta be quick.”

Tony clears his throat. He glances down at Steve’s body. Already, the airlock on the chamber is letting out a hissing stream of fog, pale white as it curls up towards the ceiling. The plate lifts, and Steve makes a split second decision. He slips into his body, lines himself up, and closes his eyes.

If he could feel his heartbeat, he knows it would be thundering a mile a minute. Instead, all he can hear is the faint whine of servos as Tony leans down, still mostly covered by the suit. He hears the clank as Tony braces a hand on the metal side of the chamber, and then his breath, coming closer. Closer.

There’s a dry rasp: skin over skin. Steve’s lips tingle faintly with warmth, and then he can’t stop himself. His eyes snap open, and Tony’s face is there. His eyes are closed, lashes a dark sweep over his cheeks. He looks beautiful, and Steve is struck suddenly by how much he _wants_. The scope of his own desire leaves him breathless, and then, suddenly, he’s kissing Tony. Their mouths slide together, slick and warm. His tongue dips against the corner of Tony’s mouth, and Tony opens up with a shocked, hurt sound. Steve wants to taste it. He wants to eat him alive. Steve swipes his tongue over the slick wall of Tony’s teeth, eager, and Tony jerks back, startled, his eyes wide. His hand presses over his mouth so hard that the skin around his fingertips turns white.

“Anything?” Peter asks eagerly.

Tony’s breath is coming in deep heaves. His eyes are wild in his face, darting over Steve’s face, his body. Steve lifts a hand to his mouth, but when he touches the skin there, he feels barely anything against his fingertips.

He sits up, and looks down at himself. He’s still not in his body. He’s still a ghost.

“ _Man_ ,” Peter says. “But he was there, for a second, right? I felt something.”

Tony doesn’t say anything. He rubs his fingers over his mouth, then pulls them away to look at them, as though he expects to find blood. The sound that he makes then is brutal in its heartbreak. Disappointment and grief made manifest. It breaks Steve’s heart in two.

“I felt him,” Tony says, unnecessarily. It’s clear to anyone with eyes. “I…shit.”

Maria types something into the computer, and the chamber begins to slide closed again. Steve jumps out as quick as he can. There’s nothing more unsettling than being sealed into his own coffin. After his first attempts at moving his body, he’d given up quickly. It was too much of a trip to lie in his own lifeless flesh and will it to move. It just made him feel more dead.

“Well, this was fascinating,” she says flatly. “Any other bright ideas?”

“Strange,” Tony and Peter say in unison, and Maria blinks at them.

“Yes, it was.”

“ _Stephen_ Strange,” Peter says, rolling his eyes. Steve doesn’t know how he’s able to convey that whilst wearing the mask, but Peter’s nothing if not expressive. “Maybe he can help.”

“Stephen already did some digging around Steve’s death. He didn’t find anything.”

“Sure, but did you tell him to look for Steve’s ghost?” Peter asks.

Tony sighs. He glances down at Steve’s body again. “No,” he admits, “because that sounds crazy.”

“I know that,” Peter says patiently. “That’s why I’m coming with you. To the Sanctorum!”

“Spidey…”

“I told you, you’ve got me until 3. Let’s go.”

\--

Steve doesn’t know how long to wait by his body. Not long, probably. It’s a shorter distance to the Sanctorum from the Triskelion than it is to the tower. Soon his crypt is empty and dark, cold he can’t feel making itself at home in the sterile space. For once he is deeply, furiously glad of it. He needs time: time to breathe, to think, to trace back over the long arc of his and Tony’s friendship and relearn its shape. He needs time to unravel the thread of Tony’s revelations. He needs time to sit down and grieve.

He braces his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and for once he is glad that there is no one to hear him scream.

It hurts. It hurts worse than anything Steve could imagine. He thinks back to all of Tony’s horrific lovers, people who didn’t deserve to touch him. Tony with Tiberius and loving Steve. Tony with _Sunset Bain_ and loving Steve. Tony drunk in a fucking gutter while Steve walked away because he couldn’t bear the thought of his own weaknesses, and still, still, loving Steve. Tony descending a staircase like a prince in a fairytale, smiling at him days before Christmas and calling him Beloved. Tony mostly naked except for the swath of red cloth that hangs from his hips, revealing himself as Iron-Man, an image that has haunted Steve for years-

The choked sound that breaks out of his mouth is inhuman. It does not echo in the space, instead landing flat and quiet against Steve’s folded fingers like a dead thing.

“Oh God,” he says. “My God.”

When did Tony know? When did Tony look at Steve and know that he loved him? When did he look at Steve and see the desire that had apparently been there, bare for him to read all these years, and decide: no. Not this one. Not this man.

_It wasn’t worth it._

The sentence, in Tony’s voice, rises to the forefront of his mind like a body rising from the river. He doesn’t know where it came from. All he feels is Tony’s grief, total and all-encompassing, wiping over his mind. For a moment, they are one being, head held in their shared hands, alone, mired in grief.

He sucks in a deep breath, and the lack of burn in his throat more than anything is what pulls him from it. Once again, he is back in his body, his own mind.

_That’s the second time that’s happened,_ Steve notes. His mind switches tracks, running back over the weeks since his death like he’s watching battle footage with the team, trying to work out where something went south. _No. More than that._

Steve lifts his head. He frowns at his own lifeless body, then nods once.

It’s time to see what Stephen Strange has to say.

Folding himself down into the static inside his own mind is easier every time. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift, riding the sparkling current like he’s blazing down the highway on a motorcycle, so fast the land flying by him blurs together. When he comes to, sleepy and disoriented, he finds himself in the middle of a standoff. On one side, Strange floats, arms folded across his chest, mouth twisted into a moue. On the other, Tony stands in that way he has when he knows he is going to lose but refuses to fold, his shoulders broad and proud. Between them is Spiderman, leaning aggressively into Strange’s space.

“No,” Strange is sneering at Spidey, “what Tony needs is a psychological professional. I cannot believe you are entertaining this behaviour-”

“I can feel it when it happens!”

“Your so-called ‘Spidey Senses’ are an imperfect tool. They do not tell you what you are sensing, just that you are sensing _something_. Perhaps what you are sensing is the danger of Iron Man in the midst of a psychotic break.”

“Oh come on, that’s a reach even for you-”

“If you entertain this nonsense and we lose not just Captain America but Iron Man as well, that’s not just a loss for the superhero community. All of his employees-”

“Why don’t you get off your high horse-”

“Spidey,” Tony says. It’s quiet, which makes Steve nervous. Tony’s quiet anger is perhaps the worst part of him. It is the most dangerous part: the fire that has crafted him into the kind of man that can kill in the same breath as he saves a life.

“This is bullshit, Tony,” Peter pleads. His eyes are wide and beseeching even through the mask. Ever the romantic, Steve knows. He can recognise a kindred soul. They both want, so badly, for the happily ever after ending.

“Let’s go,” Tony says, stone faced, and Steve bites back a growl of frustration. He waves his hands in front of Stephen’s face, then through him when he doesn’t react. “Clearly we’re wasting our time here.”

“Just look!” Peter says.

“There was no magical residue left on Cap’s body-”

“We’re not asking for you to look for magical residue, we’re telling you to look for his ghost-”

“And what of it?” Strange demands, spreading his hands. “If he is a ghost, then he is still dead. What could you possibly seek to accomplish? Do you wish to reanimate him? I’ll have no part in it-”

“What is with you two?” Spidey throws up his hands. “No one is talking about necromancy, or necrophilia, or whatever other terrible thing I am going to be accused of before this nightmare of a day is over. I just want you to scan for ghosts, or whatever it is you do.” He wriggles his fingers in the air meaningfully. “Scry for ghosts? Go dowsing for ghosts. Just do a check!”

Strange purses his lips. Then he sighs, and floats away into another room.

“Dick,” Spidey grumbles, not quietly enough in Steve’s opinion. Still, despite his manners, despite his professional respect for Strange, he can’t help but feel a little bit like he agrees.

Tony, notably, is still staring off into the middle distance. He looks…haunted. It’s quickly becoming a familiar expression, one that Steve hates, and so he sidles up next to him, bumps him gently with his hip. To his delight, Tony rocks a little with the motion, his head whipping around. His eyes are wide, flickering wildly.

“Steve?” Tony says, turning to face him. Steve reaches out, brushes his fingers against his hand for the barest moment before his fingers go right through again.

“I saw that! He pushed you?”

“You saw him?” Tony says, eyes alight, but it dies when Peter shakes his head.

“No, but I saw you move like something had bumped you.”

“In a comforting way, like-”

“Like Cap might?”

Tony smiles a little, thin and weary. He shrugs, his excitement folding back up into himself like he’s packing his emotions away in a box.

“I’ve seen you two fighting over the remote,” Spidey ribs him, body language loose and excited. “He’s getting better at it, isn’t he?”

“How should I know?”

“Has the incidence of contact increased over time?”

Tony blinks. “Well. Yes.”

“So he’s getting better at being a ghost!”

Tony’s expression is dubious, but whatever he might have said in response to that is forestalled by Strange arriving back in the room with a tattered black book, marked with symbols Steve does not recognise.

“Come,” he says, beckoning, and Tony goes to him with all the enthusiasm of a child being called to complete a household chore. “Am I to understand that Steve is here in the room with us?”

To his credit, it’s a little funny. Tony’s mouth quirks up, and for a moment, Strange’s face softens. Despite what Tony likes to say about how much he hates magic, they’re friends, almost. Steve thinks they must be, anyhow. There is an unusual kind of respect that they hold for each other as experts in their respective fields. Strange was a talented enough doctor, back before he became Sorcerer Supreme. He’s smart, in the way that Tony likes the people he surrounds himself with to be. In some ways, Steve had always been the one exception to that rule. Rhodes, Reed, the Hanks—most everyone Tony loved was brilliant in some way or another. Steve’s a skilled tactician, but he’s no genius.

“Is Zoltan gonna tell me my fortune?” Tony intones cheekily.

Strange almost looks like he might smile. Then the moment breaks, his expression shuttering. They watch as he assembles a strange collection of items: a pomegranate, a candle, a bag of animal bones, a mortar and pestle. He holds out a cup, his expression grave.

“Your blood,” he says, and Tony glances around, as if Strange might mean someone else. “It will be destroyed in the process, do not worry.”

An incredibly telling thing for him to say, Steve thinks. Or perhaps not. Most of the Avengers have worried about clones at one point or another, although usually Tony had to worry about LMDs or bots. Heck, half the time Tony was the one responsible for them.

Ah. Hell. Maybe that isn’t fair.

Tony, bless him, has rolled up his sleeve without a wince. He offers his arm to Strange, who picks up an athame and slices across Tony’s forearm without so much as a warning. Tony sucks in a breath, but otherwise doesn’t react. It’s an unbearably familiar expression on his face, and it makes Steve ache to see it.

_Damn you, Shellhead_ , he thinks. He tries to place a hand on Tony’s back to no avail.

He remembers, with a distinct kind of clarity, reading Charles Bukowski’s “Bluebird” for the first time. He’d picked up _The Last Night of the Earth Poems_ on the three dollar cart at The Strand. It was a dogeared little thing. Someone had loved it dearly, and there were notes written in all the margins in a pale, thin pencil, and he’d thought it would be a quick read. Something easy to page through in the park with a cup of coffee and then bring back, maybe for Wanda or someone else to look at. Poetry is always hit or miss for Steve: either he loves it dearly, or he wants nothing to do with it.

He regretted the choice later, but not for the reasons he’d thought. He’d been brought to tears, nearly, by how much of Tony he’d seen in the book. They’d still been rough, then. They hadn’t been quite back to speaking terms yet. And he’d stopped, at this little passage, just the smallest thing: “and I am still this / machine.” Two simple lines, but enough to make him take a moment and swallow. He’d taken a break, drank half his coffee. Then he’d opened the book back up. And then, again, in “Hangover”: “It’s all been so beastly / lovely / this mad river, / this gouging / plundering / madness / that I would wish upon / nobody / but myself, / amen.” After “Bluebird” he hadn’t been able to keep going. He’d put the book down and sat with his head in his hands in Tompkins Square Park, all around him dogs barking and little old folks taking their daily walks, and he’d thought: so this is it. This will be the thing I regret most for the rest of my life.

“What’s the blood for?” Spidey asks, startling Steve out of his reverie. He’s hanging down from the ceiling so he can peer over Strange’s workspace and watch what he’s doing. Steve didn’t even see him get up there.

“Typically,” Strange says, not looking up from his work, “this spell requires something of great importance to the deceased. We do not have a material object that matches that description, so I had to create one.”

As one, everyone in the room turns to look at Tony. Tony, who is busy bandaging his arm—alarmingly efficiently for someone working one-handed that speaks to years of him avoiding medical at all costs—does not look up. But there’s a tension in his shoulders that might as well be shouting “don’t look at me” for how obvious it is. After the day he’s had, Steve doesn’t even have the wherewithal to blush.

Steve watches as Strange performs his esoteric ritual. At one point, he makes a casual suggestion that Spiderman ought to go out and catch a pigeon for a sacrifice.

“They are, technically, doves,” he explains. Peter, predictably, refuses this request. Only the small smile that flickers concurrently over Tony and Strange’s faces hints to Steve that it might have been a joke.

Eventually, the candle is burning in a bowl filled with thick sludge. Steve can’t smell it, but whatever it is makes Tony wrinkle his nose curiously, his perfectly arched black eyebrows winging down to sit in thunderous creases over his closed eyes.

“Weird,” Spidey says.

Tony nods. He tilts his head to the side, curious, and then his brows lift in surprise. A faint flush appears, just the barest hint of it across the bridge of his nose. Steve is uncommonly fascinated by the sight. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Tony blush before. Steve didn’t think he even could. He wonders what it is he’s feeling.

The smoke coils around the room, slowly, filling it up. When it hits Tony he expects something to happen, but nothing does. Tentatively, he pushes his hands into it, but it moves right through him. It’s like he’s not even there.

By Strange’s expression, this is not the desired result. Tony can tell, and any levity that had creeped into his face immediately falters, then disappears entirely as the smoke fills the whole of the room.

“I take it that’s a negative result, Doctor.”

“So it is.”

Tony nods, as though he’d expected this. It’s a front: Steve can tell he’s disappointed, grieving almost. But neither of these men know Tony like Steve does, and Tony’s greatest armour has always been the one he constructs in his own mind. His shields are up, and so they will remain until he is once again in the safety of his own space.

“Time to go, Spidey.”

Spiderman slumps. “That’s it? We’re just giving up?” He rounds on Strange, who says nothing, then Tony, who is already pushing himself to standing. “You, Tony Stark, are giving up?”

Strange studies Tony carefully, but there’s nothing there for him to see. There’s just his blank face as he gathers his things, flexing his injured arm a little.

“Thank you for trying, Stephen. Let’s go Spiderman.”

“Tony-”

“Enough.” He spares Peter a tired smile. “Didn’t you have a previous engagement this afternoon?”

Spiderman stares at him for a long moment. Almost too long. It’s strange, to see him so still, and Steve resists the urge to fidget as the silence stretches out to awkward lengths. Tony, to his credit, simply meets his gaze calmly and waits.

“Fine,” Peter says, and Tony nods once. He nods towards Stephen, then heads towards the foyer.

“Give him time,” Strange says, quiet. “We just got Steve back, and then…” He sighs. “It’s no wonder that he’s…struggling. He’s been through a lot.”

“You’re wrong,” Peter tells him. His voice is low and fierce, coiled tension in his body. “You’ll see. We’ll prove it.”

Strange smiles thinly at him. “And will that assuage your guilt for your part in their War?” he asks.

Peter rears back as though Strange has slapped him. “You’re a miserable, callous man,” he tells Strange. It’s a shockingly angry sentence from Spiderman, but that was a shockingly harsh truth, even from Strange. “At least I did something, instead of hiding in the arctic circle.”

A tug towards the hall distracts Steve, and he fights it a little, wanting to see what happens next. But then the tug happens again, harder.

“Come on, Steve!” Tony shouts from the front hall, and Steve blinks, shocked, and does as he’s told. Peter similarly bolts upright, and he turns and makes his way towards Tony alongside him.

“How did you know where Steve was?” Peter asks once they reach the front door, and Tony shrugs in the armour. It’s a strange motion, one that is uniquely Iron Man.

“I don’t think he can go too far from me,” Tony says, clearly having decided to…well, Steve might say give up the ghost, if he was feeling at all inclined towards humour. It was the kind of joke that would leave Tony groaning. “I feel a tug. Sort of like I’ve forgotten something important. I can’t explain it.”

Steve had no idea that was how Tony experienced it. That’s fascinating. Why is the sensation so different for him? Does it have anything to do with Steve sometimes feeling like he’s feeling what Tony is feeling?

“So what, he’s always with you?”

“I don’t think so,” Tony says impatiently. “Look, I’m headed home, but.” He hesitates, awkward. He claps a hand to Peter’s shoulder. “Thanks for trying.”

“This isn’t over,” Peter says stubbornly, and Tony lets out a tired laugh.

“I didn’t say it was.” He offers a half-hearted salute. “See you later, Spider man.”

Steve closes his eyes and lets the rush take him back to his body. He doesn’t fancy letting Tony drag him back to the tower through the air.


	6. if the current is strong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyyyy, here's where things get a little steamy. You know what that means! Specific spoilery warnings. Skip if you don't need, stay safe if you do.
> 
> [SPOILERS] Tony doesn't know if Steve is real/if Steve is really Steve. Desperate and a little high, he kind of joking but not really invites Steve to stay, then jacks off while imagining Steve is there. Steve, of course, is there, and has a ~~moment of weakness~~ (aka totally jumps him.) Tony is on board with it in the moment but has a Big Emotional Time afterwards. This is not about the sex, but about the fact that he thinks he's literally going crazy. However it is a potentially triggering sex scene. If you need to skip it, it'll be pretty heckin' clear when it stars. You can control/command + F for the sentence "Fuck, I’m going crazy." to skip.

> "I'll just go around this rock and think  
> About it later." That's what you said.  
> When death came, you said, "I'll go there."  
>   
> There's no sign you'll come back. Sometimes  
> My father sat up in the coffin and was alive again.  
> But I think you were born before my father,  
> And the feet they made in your time were lighter.  
>   
> One dusk you were gone. Sometimes a fallen tree  
> Holds onto a rock, if the current is strong.
> 
> – Robert Blythe, “When William Stafford Died”

_There must be a word for this feeling,_ Steve thinks. _German, maybe._

The Germans have always been good at describing the horror of things.

Devastated. Perhaps that’s the word. He rolls it around in his mouth as he watches Tony and Carol pass a joint between them, as far across the room as he can manage comfortably. He wants to give them privacy, but he can’t bear the thought of leaving Tony alone right now. Of returning to that place, the room with his dead body lying still and cold.

White smoke spills out of Tony’s mouth in rings, a skill that delights Carol to no end. She tries to emulate him and mostly fails, much to her chagrin. It’s a good look on them. Steve doesn’t think they’ve spent any real quality time together since his death. He suspects the truth of it is that Tony is punishing himself. If he grieves alone he cannot be comforted. He cannot be absolved of the guilt that lies heavy across his shoulders. Steve understands this impulse well.

Steve had watched Tony flip his red AA chit back and forth over his knuckles for twenty minutes, helpless, angry. He’d eventually managed to catch Tony’s fingers in his own, which had startled the man enough that he jerked upright, the chip falling from his fingers and rolling to a stop on the floor. Then he’d called Carol, and she’d come over, and Tony had pulled out a little brown paper bag full of airtight canisters that Steve had never seen before. All these years, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Tony get high like this. He’s seen Tony already intoxicated, but watching this process feels unbearably intimate. Something about the look of it twists in his gut like an eel, desire and hurt curling over each other into this messy thing that aches and aches. He knows he shouldn’t be here for this. Carol was Tony’s go-to when he was having problems with Steve. It had been that way since the War, and he expects that it will continue to be so long into the future. Carol understands parts of Tony that Steve never has, parts that aren’t wholly encapsulated by the shared meaning of the chips they both carry with them, but are certainly representative of it. Carol or Tony might say that they are both fucked up in the same way: stubborn bastards with complex pasts, whose worst enemy is themselves. That was what Tony had said to Steve once, anyhow, when Steve had asked him about it. Maybe he’d been a little jealous. Nobody could prove anything.

The truth is, their whole relationship is littered with little moments like this: things Steve wouldn’t let himself feel. And maybe it is because it was forbidden, in some small part of Steve’s mind. Perhaps Tony had been right about that. There is some small piece of him, left over from his youth, that skitters away from thoughts of men like that. Even though he’d fought bullies for saying bigoted things when he was young. Even though he’d stood up for Arnie. It’s different, when it’s you. When you’re Catholic. When you’re Army. When you’re the walking avatar of a country that doesn’t always abide by its own high standards of equality and fairness for all.

But mostly, Steve thinks, it’s because even without knowing what Tony felt like under his hands, his mouth, he already loves Tony. He loves him so much it hurts. And it’s dangerous, that feeling. Loving Tony feels dangerous, like a cliff’s edge he cannot come back from. It’s always been just as alluring to his adrenaline-loving heart. He and Tony are wildly combustible, and loving him in that way had always felt like a step too far. To love Tony in that way means that he would own every inch of Steve, more than he already does. Even before his death, it still felt like Tony was a magnet. Steve has always been pulled firmly to Tony’s North Pole, always intensely aware of everything he is. Everywhere he is. Tony has been his home, and his first anchor to this life, and the abstract representation of his desperate wish for a utopian future that they both know doesn’t really exist. But sometimes, on good days, Tony can make him believe in it. Some days, Tony can make him believe in anything.

With the benefit of hindsight, Steve can now say that is the true horror of how the Civil War had happened between them. For the second time in his life, Steve hadn’t been willing to listen. He’d put his foot down. The first time he’d done it, he’d almost lost Tony down a bottle, and to this day he still regrets giving up so easily. Images of his own father drunk and angry had crawled up out of his past like a monster, blinding him. He’d left Tony alone in that horrible place. He’d let him end up on the streets.

And it doesn’t matter, that Tony had once again proved himself to be un-killable, unbeatable. It doesn’t matter that Tony has always saved himself, always wrenched himself, bleeding and desperate, out of the hands of death. Steve remembers reading Sherman Alexie’s “Survivorman” and immediately thinking of Tony crossing twenty five miles of desert and carrying a newly born superhero inside of him, the chest plate simultaneously weighing and buoying his heart. Every time, the final lines of that poem echo inside of him: “Do you think you could be that good and strong? / _Yes, yes,_ you think, but you’re probably wrong.” Tony, for all that he’s struggled with depression and alcoholism and God knew what else, wants to live more than anyone else Steve knows. He isn’t sure he knows anyone else with that kind of fortitude.

He thinks of Tony loving him while Steve tossed him aside, put his fist through the wall of a dingy motel in his anger, left him there alone and shaking. He thinks of Tony nearly freezing to death from cold, and remembering the angry words that passed between them. The thought of it makes his non-existent stomach roil with guilty nausea.

Loving Tony any more than he already does would create a singularity. It’s something he knows he could never undo. It’s something he does not deserve. If the Civil War was what it was like when they reach an intractable problem and there still remains some form of barrier between them, what would it be like when the thin line between them has been erased? Steve knew from his father exactly how love could turn to hate. To violence. It was in his blood, same as his mother’s healing hands, and he’d always known exactly what kind he’d inherited. He was a killer, just like his pa. He can feel that sense of betrayal still lingering between his teeth, the pressure to bite like a vicious, feral thing. The memory of Tony under his hands, shaking, blood on his face, will haunt him until the day he dies. Tony deserves better than Steve. He knows that isn’t what Tony thinks. It probably isn’t what anyone thinks, save for a small handful of people who love Tony better than they love Captain America. Carol. Jim Rhodes. Pepper Hogan. Jan, maybe, when Jan was still around. God, but he misses her.

Steve turns and watches Tony and Carol curled up on the workshop couch, heads tipped together. Tony’s shaking his head back and forth, Carol’s strong hands curled around Tony’s wrists. She’s speaking lowly to him, and Steve intentionally concentrates on the whir of the servers, the central air, the whine of electricity. He does his best not to overhear. He thinks he understands why they’ve never dated, but Carol could be good for Tony, he thinks. She’d keep his head on straight. Bully him into taking care of himself.

_I used to do that_ , he remembers. Before the War. Before they’d broken apart. Bitter jealousy curls through him. _He never even gave me a chance._

\--

That night, there’s a restlessness to Tony’s motions that makes Steve anxious. He goes about his nightly ablutions quickly, nervously. There’s a shakiness to him that cannot be encapsulated by the slow, lazy night of cavorting and quiet, soul-baring sweetness he’d shared with Carol.

He dithers in the bathroom doorway. He glances into the shower, then back towards the bed.

“Steve?” he says, finally.

Steve sucks in a breath.

“I’m here, Tony.”

Tony breathes slow. He closes his eyes. “You…you might wanna get out of here. If you’re here. Go…wherever it is you go.” He laughs, softly. “Or maybe not.”

Steve frowns. “Why?”

He gets his answer pretty quickly. Tony strips off his shirt, normal enough for him when he’s sleeping. But then he steps out of his boxers, entirely naked. He leans over, the dimples above his rear perfect to Steve’s stunned eyes, and rummages in the bedside table. He pulls out a bottle-

“Oh God,” Steve says. He turns around, his face flaming. “Ohh. No, no no no.”

The sheets rustle behind him, but Steve’s mind is blank. It’s white noise. He can’t think. And then, Tony lets out a hissing sigh.

Steve goes to rest his head against the wall, but all that does is put his head through and into the shower. For a moment, he pauses there: halfway between rooms, his disembodied form floating between. Tony grunts, low, and Steve takes a quick two steps into the shower. He sits down on the tile, puts his face between his knees.

“Hell,” he says again. This is Hell. It must be: temptation, and punishment, and remorse.

In the next room, Tony lets out the sweetest, deepest groan he’s ever heard anyone make. It echoes through the half-open door of the bathroom. It puts Steve’s heart in his throat.

He thinks about going back to the Triskelion. He should do that. That would- It would be the right thing to do, is all. That’s what he should do, and he-

“Steve,” Tony gasps, and Steve sits up. Heat rushes down to his cock. He doesn’t know if he can get hard, but by God, he wants so many things. He’s just a man. “Fuck.”

Tony knows he’s here. He knows. He has to know. He has to-

There’s a slick sound, picking up in pace. Unbidden, images spring to mind. It’s like he never left. The wall is doing nothing to protect Tony’s modesty. Steve has swallowed his tongue. His mouth is dry. He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t stay here. He should go. He should leave, and come back in the morning, and forget this ever-

Tony lets out a high, needy whine, and Steve bolts upright. He takes a deep breath.

He steps back through the wall.

Steve knows, in this moment, that this sight will eat away at him for the rest of however long his consciousness abides. It is powerful enough to supersede the image of Tony wrapped in nothing but bright crimson fabric, draped over his hips like some kind of glorious Roman statue. Here, Tony is naked in the entire, golden and beautiful in the lamplight. Steve can see the tendons of his thighs straining, the small divot at the place where they meet groin a shadow that Steve desperately wants to press his tongue to. His gaze lingers there, because he knows that anywhere else he might look is more treacherous.

“Oh,” Tony gasps, and Steve can’t help it. He glances up to look at Tony’s face, and it feels like all of the blood in his body rushes to an organ that he doesn’t currently have any meaningful ability to use. There’s a fine sheen of sweat on Tony’s brow, limning him in the light. His mouth is open, tongue slipping out to touch the corner, and Steve has a sudden visceral memory of how it felt to kiss him, to taste the startled sound he’d made in that dark, cold room. Tony’s got one hand on his cock and his other-

Two fingers twist into Tony, _inside_ , it’s-

Steve falls to his knees on the bed between Tony’s thighs, his hands hovering over Tony’s trembling legs.

“Yes-” Tony manages, a half-bitten off kind of sound, and his eyes are closed. His eyes are closed, but Steve can imagine what he’s seeing. He knows. He knows, because Tony said he could stay. Tony kissed him. _Tony_ _said_ _my name_. Tony’s wanted him, and with the dizziness of arousal swimming through him he can’t think of why he shouldn’t… just…

He reaches out and puts a hand on the inside of one beautiful trembling thigh, his thumb sweeping into the divot there, pressing into that secret, hollowed out place. The skin is unbearably soft under his calloused finger. It makes him hitch a moan, the sound breaking out of his mouth unbidden.

Tony’s eyes shock open. His back arches, his whole body shaking as he comes all over his own stomach, his chest, pooling in his collarbone-

Steve lets out an inhuman sound and leans down, swiping his tongue over Tony’s throat where the last bit of his release had landed. He can’t taste anything, but the sound Tony makes is gorgeous, wrung-out and wrecked. It makes Steve set his teeth to the tendon there, his whole body shaking. He tucks a hand under Tony’s lower back, puts the tips of his fingers to the dimples there. He pulls him up into his body, makes himself at home in the cradle of Tony’s hips, and surges up to kiss him on the mouth.

The shocked, strangled sound that Tony makes breaks him out of his fervour. Steve’s eyes open, his heart thundering in his chest as he comes back to himself, and in the interim he loses his ability to touch. His hands are no longer touching Tony. He’s once again anchorless, unable to reach him, and this time it truly breaks his heart. He can feel the ache of it below his breastbone, and he closes his eyes and lets out a stream of curses that he’s glad no one can hear.

“Steve,” Tony gasps. He’s completely shocked, wide-eyed and panting. Moisture gathers at the corners of his eyes. “Fuck, I’m going crazy. I’m- I’m really, I’m really-”

Steve is sick of this shit.

“No,” he says firmly. He reaches a hand out and thinks not of touching Tony, but of how much he _needs_ to touch Tony. He _believes_ that he will touch Tony. Touching Tony is incidental to his desires. Nothing, not even death, is going to stop him.

He reaches out and cups Tony’s face in his hand.

Tears well in Tony’s eyes. His eyes flicker wildly from side to side, searching the room, and so Steve takes his messy hand and puts it on Steve’s face. He sucks Tony’s thumb into his mouth and imagines the taste of him, and it’s enough to make him moan.

“I can feel you,” Tony whispers, and Steve smiles against his fingers. “Steve.”

Steve leans down and presses a kiss to the corner of Tony’s mouth.

Tony sucks in a sharp breath. He blinks, fat tears rolling out of his eyes, down to soak into the pillow. A sob works its way out of his throat.

“Oh, Tony,” Steve murmurs, “please don’t cry.”

But he can’t seem to stop, now. Tony shakes, the force of his sobs taking him harder than the pleasure had. He curls into a ball, into Steve’s chest, his whole body shaking with the force of it. It’s not the quiet crying Steve’s seen before: this is loud, and broken, unlike anything Steve’s ever seen from him. Tony’s fingers scrabble at his chest, up to his neck, feel there for a pulse that he knows means nothing.

“Shh,” Steve murmurs. He gathers him into his chest, sweeps his hands comfortingly over his back, but it only makes Tony cry harder. “Tony, please.”

“I can’t hear you,” Tony gasps, and Steve leans down and presses their foreheads together. “Your chest-”

He can feel Steve talking, but he can’t hear him. Steve nods against his face. He sweeps his hand down Tony’s back, presses his fingers into the dimples at the base of his spine. It’s his first time touching them, and already it’s his favourite place to put his hands.

I M H E R E, he taps, slow and clear. I V E G O T Y O U S H E L L H E A D.

Tony shudders. There’s fear in his face. Steve knows it well. It’s perhaps the least favourite of the expressions he’s familiar with. But he doesn’t push Steve away, and he doesn’t say anything else. He just subsides into hiccoughing breaths, pressing his forehead as firmly as he can to Steve’s. He tangles his fingers in Steve’s hair.

Eventually, his eyes drift shut. The tension goes out of him. He’s exhausted.

Unconscious, stripped of all his barriers, he leans fully into Steve’s hand.

“Okay,” Steve says, quietly. He takes a slow, deep breath. “Okay.”

* * *

Steve must fall asleep, although he doesn’t remember it. He isn’t sure where he goes when he sleeps. He doesn’t know if he dreams.

What he knows is that he’s woken by a gentle tug. When he opens his eyes, the bed is empty, and Tony is moving around in the bathroom. The sun slants bright over the bed.

“Steve,” Tony calls with forced casualness, “please get up so I can pee in peace.”

Sheepishly, Steve rolls out of bed and moves towards the bathroom door.

“That’s a dear.”

Steve rubs a hand over the back of his head, frowning out into the dark room. He reaches his arms over his head in a stretch he can’t really feel. He wishes he could see Tony. He wishes Tony could see him. He wishes he could give Tony a kiss good morning, talk about what happened last night. He wishes he could ask Tony why he never chose Steve, if he’d loved him all this time.

_You know why_ , he thinks. He rubs a hand over his tired face.

He thinks about trying to touch Tony this morning, but the man barely stops long enough for Steve to try. He’s a whirlwind, getting dressed with an efficiency that betrays his desire to hide from what happened between them. He doesn’t speak to Steve again, and when Steve reaches out and brushes his fingers over the jut of bone at Tony’s shoulder, he flinches away. It’s enough to make Steve’s breath trip in his throat.

“Please don’t,” Tony says. His voice breaks on the second word. It’s the last thing he says to Steve before he leaves the room.

Tony breezes into the communal kitchen to grab coffee and an entire box of raspberries, lifting a tired hand to wave at Luke and Dani. She’s got mashed banana all over her face, sticky fingers tucked into her gummy little mouth. Jessica is standing by the windows, muttering into her cell phone, and Steve hoists himself up to perch on the kitchen island. He leans down and makes a funny face at Dani, but she doesn’t react at all.

“Morning,” Luke grunts, dabbing ineffectually at the banana juice splattered across his chest.

Tony yawns into his coffee cup. “Mmph.” He rubs a careless hand across his nose. “Sorry. Morning, Luke. Morning, Tiny Human.”

“Tatatatata,” Dani tells him, and Tony grins at her. The brightness of it changes his whole face.

“Toh-nee,” he says, dragging the syllables out. Dani offers him a smushed clump of banana, and Tony shakes his head gravely. “Oh, no, that’s your breakfast honey. You eat that for your dad, ok?”

“Toh.”

“Tony!” Tony says, delighted.

“Towowowo.”

“Pretty god, tater tot.”

“Hey. Stop flirting with my daughter and let her eat her breakfast,” Luke grumbles at him, and Tony and Steve snort in unison. “Dani, baby, the banana goes _in_ your mouth.”

“She’s a little young for me.”

“Oh, really? Didn’t know that was possible.”

“Don’t make it weird, Cage.”

“You do that on your own,” Luke retorts. Tony laughs and turns to refill his mug. “Hey. You hanging in there?”

Tony pauses, bent over the coffee pot. His shoulders are tense, the dual whammy of his tenuous relationship with Luke and his reticence to talk to anyone about Steve mixing into whatever mortified expression Steve is sure he’s trying to hide by leaning over the counter. Steve reaches out a hand to comfort him, but the memory of Tony flinching away from him stops him. He fists his hands at his sides, glances over to where Luke is watching Tony with a narrow-eyed expression on his face. He hands Dani another piece of banana.

“I’m fine,” Tony says, finally. He turns and offers Luke a plastic, movie-star smile.

“Uh huh.” Luke sighs. “Carol told me the team could use you in the field.”

“Luke…”

“Don’t do that martyr shit. I know it’s your favourite thing, but…”

Tony rolls his eyes, but his shoulders slump a little. The tenseness in his body leaks out, and Steve wishes he could clap a hand to Tony’s shoulder. Cheer him up even just a little. “Thanks, Poppa Cage.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Tony smiles thinly at him, and Luke twists his lips up into a grimace. “You should go outside. Take a walk. It’s a nice day.”

Steve is intimately familiar with what happens next: Tony, shifting his weight side to side, eyes darting, desperate to escape a conversation. “Got work to do,” he says. He shrugs, awkward. Then he turns, winking over his shoulder at little Dani. Dani is safe ground. She’s cute, and she loves everyone, and they have no history. Steve huffs an exasperated laugh. “Later, Munchkin.”

“Towo babababababa.”

“Bye bye!”

Steve trails behind, reluctant to leave Tony alone despite his earlier warning. He feels hollowed out, like last night had carved him open and left his skin on wrong. He wishes, desperately, that Tony would let him touch him. That he could talk to him. He wants to talk about what happened. He wants to ask Tony if that was only because he was intoxicated, or if all this time, he could have reached out and touched-

“What’re you thinking about?”

Steve startles, glancing up. Tony’s paused at the entrance to the workshop, one eyebrow quirked up as he gazes sightlessly towards Steve.

“Tony?”

Tony stares for a moment more. Then he shakes his head and heads inside, leaving Steve to scramble after him.

“Friday, open a new project folder on my private server. Title…Unchained Melody.”

“Done and done.”

Tony claps his hands together. “Great. Now we’re gonna run some tests. Steve, come stand here.” He taps his foot on a marker on the workshop floor, then holds out a hand.

“Oh.” Steve takes a breath, a shaky smile making its way onto his face. “You’re not running away at all.”

“Come on, you can do it,” Tony says encouragingly. Then he shifts, his body turning lissom, insouciant. “Or do I have to get naked again?”

“Tony!” Steve manages. He’s unaccountably glad that Tony can’t see his face. He stumbles forward and gathers himself, then gently presses his hand into Tony’s. As soon as he’s sure it’s solid, he scrambles into Tony’s space, cupping his cheek. He presses their foreheads together.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony says. His expression is wry; dark circles linger under his eyes, lips pressed into a thin line of exhaustion. He places a gentle hand on Steve’s chest, pushing them apart. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot you want to say to me right now. Save it for when we can actually talk face to face, okay?”

Steve frowns. He shakes his head against Tony’s forehead, noses catching. It makes him want to press his mouth to Tony’s, to draw their bodies together again.

“Steve,” Tony says, in that tired, exasperated way that Steve has always hated. “I’m putting a lot on faith here. I don’t even know you are who you say you are. I don’t even know if you’re real. So we’re gonna run some brain scans on me, and see if Friday is able to pick anything up, and then we’ll go from there. Okay?”

Steve doesn’t like that answer very much, but he can see the sense in it. If he was on the outside, he’d be outraged that Tony was being so trusting. He’d be worried for his safety. If anything he should be delighted that Tony’s showing a rare strain of self-preservation.

As it is, all he wants to do is put his mouth to Tony’s. He wants to ask him why he waited all this time. He wants to shake him. He wants to take him apart with his teeth.

He settles for pulling Tony down into his chest and pressing his mouth to the dark hair above his ear. He hugs him as tightly as he can without hurting him.

“Steve,” Tony says, quiet.

Steve takes a slow breath, but he can’t smell anything. The expensive herb and wood smell of Tony’s shampoo is just a memory.

He presses a kiss to Tony’s temple. He lets him go.


	7. let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More complicated sexy times. If the last spoilery warning applied to you, ditto for this one. Skip the whole section that begins "That night, Tony welcomes Steve into his bed again." It's short and v sad.

> You do not have to be good.  
> You do not have to walk on your knees  
> for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.  
> You only have to let the soft animal of your body  
> love what it loves.
> 
> – Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

It would be too simple, if a few scans were enough to uncover the secret of Steve’s death. He hadn’t expected them to.

What was startling was Tony’s reaction. His brain scans hadn’t betrayed any abnormalities. By all measures, Tony is processing information as normally as possible for someone of Tony Stark’s calibre. But the discovery that there is nothing to suggest that Tony has been hallucinating was not enough to soothe Tony’s frayed nerves. If anything, it sent him into overdrive. More than once Jim has come into the workshop to find Tony strung out on too much coffee and too little sleep, his hands shaking. He is a master of soothing Tony’s tattered nerves, of gentling him into rest. A small, bitter part of Steve knows that this is something Jim has seen and done many more times than he can know, and it makes him jealous enough to want to dig his fingers into Tony’s hips, his wrists, and leave his mark there.

He wants Tony to be his. After all the years of waiting, all he wants is to clutch Tony to his chest and keep him there, warm and safe and loved desperately, achingly.

They still haven’t talked.

Lately, Steve often finds himself wondering whether he should be touching Tony at all. Some days, every caress makes Tony freeze, caught somewhere between guilty pleasure and terrified exhaustion. No matter how much he sleeps, he doesn’t look rested.

It had been a delight, at first, to be able to touch Tony at all. But the more time passed, the more it became clear that Tony was coming apart at the seams. Steve feels like a man possessed, because even seeing how strung out Tony is cannot stop him from reaching out and touching him. He taps Morse into the back of Tony’s hands. He writes letters into his skin. He can’t keep himself away. He can’t stop touching Tony, now that he can. Now that he knows Tony would want him to, wants him to. Wants Steve, as torn as he might be about it. Steve can touch him in new ways, too, ways he never could before. Ways he’d never even let himself imagine. It’s intoxicating. It makes him wish he could leave a mark: some evidence that Tony isn’t dreaming.

I M H E R E, he tells Tony, every night. I M S T I L L H E R E

One night, he can’t help but kiss Tony while he’s sleeping: slack and sickly pale, dark shadows laying out the shapes of his bones. Tony wakes with Steve’s name on his lips, wide eyed. He touches his mouth, sits up gasping. His eyes are wild in his face.

“Sorry,” Steve murmurs, taking Tony’s face between his hands. He presses their foreheads together. “I’m sorry.”

“What do you want from me?” Tony asks, squeezing his eyes shut. He says it again, again, until he’s shouting it: “What! What do you _want_?”

Steve doesn’t touch him for days after, too horrified at his own lack of self-control. It’s everything he’d feared. Tony, for his part, throws himself headfirst into his work. He perfects a new cloaking technology, although what makes it superior to the already unbelievable stuff Tony had before Steve doesn’t know. Eventually he pushes out so many prototypes to R&D that Pepper comes looking for him. She takes one look at him and, without a word regarding his condition, spends a whole two hours watching a silly animated film called _Quest for Camelot_ that Steve—and apparently Tony, which is more interesting—has never seen before.

“King Arthur doesn’t even _do_ anything in this film,” Tony complains. “Merlin has what, two scenes? Why not just make this a generic fantasy film?”

“Because this is a movie about how the marginalised people behind great and powerful men never get the recognition they deserve,” Pepper tells him, and Tony’s resulting laugh is the most genuine expression of contentment or joy Steve has seen him wear in days.

“Trying to tell me something, Pep?”

“Perish the thought, Mr. Stark.”

After, Pepper gathers up all her things and folds Tony into her arms like he is something small and precious. She presses a gentle kiss to his forehead.

“The day after Happy died, I woke up and I thought, Oh. So this is the rest of my life,” she whispers. It is barely loud enough for Steve to be able to pick up on it even with his superhearing, and for a moment he is deeply ashamed of himself for listening in. Tony stiffens visibly in her arms. “It’ll get better, Tones. I promise.”

And then she’s gone: a clack of heels, the elevator dinging. They are once again alone.

“Steve?” Tony murmurs, when the silence has become loud enough that it rings in the room like a singing bowl.

Steve reaches out. He touches the nape of Tony’s neck. He pulls him into his body, holds him as he shakes apart.

\--

That night, Tony welcomes Steve into his bed again.

He calls for Steve in a low voice, waits for his touch. He tips his face up like a flower when Steve leans in to kiss him gently. They haven’t talked, still, but Steve knows better than anyone how Tony squirrels away the more delicate parts of himself. And he’s selfish, in the end. He’s wanted this for so, so long. He doesn’t remember what it’s like not to want this. Most astounding of all, he can have it. He can have whatever he wants.

Tony closes his eyes, then takes his clothes off slowly, the way a lover might. He lets Steve run his hands over his shoulders, down his chest. They move slowly this time. It’s tentative. Later, nestled once again between Tony’s legs, rutting lazily against each other, Steve learns that he can, in fact, reach orgasm if he works at it enough. Tony proves more than willing to put the time in, and he buries the shaking moan that bursts out of him in his lover’s mouth. He wishes he could feel Tony’s breath on his face.

Tony doesn’t open his eyes once.

Afterwards, Steve lies on his back in Tony’s bed for a long time. He watches the light change in the room. He leans down and presses soft kisses to Tony’s chest, traces his damnable obliques with his tongue. He curses when he loses his ability to touch halfway through mapping Tony’s ribs, regains it again when he manages to hook Tony’s thighs over his shoulders. Tony is half-awake, beautiful in dreams. His eyes flutter open and shut, Steve’s name falling from his lips in a gentle litany as he submits. Steve thought nothing more could surprise him about his non-corporeal form, but Tony’s release passing through him as he sucks him is unaccountably startling. It’s enough to make him take Tony a little too deep, the surprise of it making Tony arch up in a mix of oversensitivity and ecstasy. It makes Steve want to have him all over again.

I L O V E Y O U

“Don’t,” Tony snaps. He shoves at Steve’s chest, eyes welling with tears. “Why is this happening to me? Please stop. Stop.” Steve grabs his wrists, tries to still his thrashing. He tucks Tony into his chest. He speaks it against the skin of his neck.

I M H E R E

“No you’re not! Don’t lie to me!”

Eventually, Tony stops sleeping in his bed entirely. He shuts himself into his workshop. Steve learns to only touch him when Tony begs for it—when he comes, slinking and guilty like a scolded pet, and murmurs Steve’s name into the night like an invocation.

* * *

At first, Steve was glad that Tony had stopped punishing himself and was relying on his support network again. Now, he isn’t so sure. He thinks, perhaps, Tony reaching out is actually a sign of the darkening skies of his internal landscape. Finding nothing when Friday ran every possible scan she could think of on Steve has been hell on Tony’s confidence in his own sanity. With every day that passes, he looks more haggard. Regardless of whether or not he is provably insane, he isn’t provably sane either. No matter how much he sleeps, he always looks tired. He’s visibly lost weight.

“You’ve gotta stop doing this to yourself,” Jim pleads with him one morning. “Please.”

“I’m eating,” Tony protests. Reluctantly, Steve agrees. Tony isn’t doing anything any more self-destructive than usual. It’s like the grief is a parasite, eating him from the inside. There’s another animal that lives behind Tony’s eyes, now: something hunted and unclean and hungry. “I dunno what to tell you. I just…”

It’s unnatural, for Tony to be left with a lack of words. Seeing it gives Steve a chill unlike anything he’s ever felt before.

“Tony.”

“I can only do the best I can do, Rhodey.”

It is the least Tony Stark sentence Steve has ever heard him say in his life.

It doesn’t help that Steve still can’t always control his ability to touch. Touching Tony takes effort. It’s exhausting. He feels as wrung out as Tony looks. He wishes he felt more rested after he sleeps. There is nothing more excruciating than watching Tony’s face fall when he calls for Steve and receives no answer. Once, it took Steve nearly an hour to manage it, and in the interim Tony hadn’t even cried. He’d simply shut down. His entire body had stilled. The only motion he seemed to be able to make was his mouth, murmuring Steve’s name. Calling for him. Begging.

Steve does not know how much more of this they can take. Perhaps it would be better if he were just dead. At least Tony could move on. Like this, they’re trapped. Tony begins to resemble nothing more or less than a broken-winged hawk—something ready to die, but not able to do the deed itself. He thinks, maybe, this is the thing that Carol and Beth and all the rest had known to be afraid of. The thing living in Tony’s body is not his friend. It is a creature that preys upon him. It eats him up from within, one day at a time.

Eventually, a new shape darkens the doorway of Tony’s workshop: Reed Richards, hovering as though unsure of his welcome, his long-fingered hands twisting together.

Steve is startled by how glad he is to see him.

“I haven’t seen you in months,” Reed says. Even here, when he’s come to Tony with a specific purpose, he comes across as distracted. “You haven’t come by at all. I noticed.” He sounds a little bewildered, even as he’s saying it. “Sue didn’t tell me to come. I came on my own.”

Tony lets out a stuttering laugh. He glances away from the schematics he’s working on, a rare warm expression crossing his face as he looks back over his shoulder. “Hello to you too, Reed.”

“Are you…” He falters, then lets out a soft sound of sorrow. He reaches out one long arm towards the glass Tony’s got resting on the corner of one worktop, dips his littlest finger into it. “You’re not…uh. Drinking. Are you?”

Tony turns to look at Reed with a glare that could peel paint off of a spaceship. Reed unabashedly puts his finger in his mouth, nodding at whatever he tastes.

“No, I didn’t think so.” He makes his way into the room in that strange way of his, almost more like a snake than a man. When he reaches Tony’s side he pauses, always awkward with human emotion, before pulling a chair over and sitting catty corner to him. “What can I do?”

“There’s nothing you can do, Reed,” Tony says tiredly. He offers his old friend a small, genuine smile. “But thank you, for coming.”

“Well, that’s not like you,” Reed says. Reasonably, Steve thinks. Reed even looks a little affronted. There’s something quietly charming about his flailing attempts. It speaks, if nothing else, to his love for Tony. “There’s always something to do. When something’s wrong, we fix it, don’t we?”

Tony jerks back a little, like Reed’s hit him. It’s so simple, said like that. There’s always been something admirable about Reed’s absent-minded wisdom. Sometimes, Steve thinks he’s the only one Tony will listen to.

Tony blinks, slowly, exactly once.

“Steve’s haunting me.”

He says it easily, considering it’s the first time he’s said as much to anyone since his run in with Strange. But his relationship with Reed has always been mystifying to Steve. Reed understands parts of Tony that no one else on Earth ever will.

_This is it_ , Steve realises, Tony’s last hope. He’s sure both of them know it to be so. He wonders, maybe, if Tony was waiting for this. If that knowledge is what stayed his hand, stopped him from calling in the one person he always turns to when his indomitable brain finally hits a wall it cannot break.

Reed takes this in. “You mean…”

“I mean literally.” Tony says. He scowls at whatever he’s working on, pulling up another holoscreen and examining a long string of data that Steve couldn’t make heads or tails of even if pressed to at gunpoint. Naturally, Reed reaches over and points to a variable, and Tony lets out a delighted noise. He closes the data stream and opens his project back up, moving a few pieces around. “He’s a ghost, and he spends all his time following me around and touching me and telling me things in old-timey American Morse code.”

Reed nods, slowly. He reaches out and gently adjusts whatever it is that Tony’s working on, his brow furrowing ever so slightly when Tony bats his hand away. “You’re sure about this.”

“Spiderman can feel when he’s in the room. There’s nothing wrong with my brain scans. I don’t- He’s not a hallucination, but Stephen couldn’t find any hint of him. I’m… God, I’m tired _all the time_.”

Reed reaches out, one large hand closing over Tony’s forearm. He pulls him around to face him, his eyes darting over Tony’s face. Steve knows what he sees there: the gauntness of him, the way the skin under his eyes looks permanently bruised.

“How long has this been going on?” he asks, quiet.

Tony shakes his head. He doesn’t meet Reed’s eyes.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

Tony huffs a laugh. “It’s _ghosts_ , Reed.”

“It’s me,” Reed counters, and Tony sucks in a breath. His eyes dart up to meet Reed’s for a moment before flickering away again. “It’s you and me, Tony. Let me help you.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Well,” Reed says, a wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth, “what have you done so far?”

\--

There’s no quantifiable reason for it, but Reed forcing his way onto the case dramatically changes Tony’s emotional landscape from dispossessed malaise to driven focus. A bit of colour returns to his cheeks. The light reappears in his eyes.

Not once does Reed ever even hint that Tony might be delusional. It is, perhaps, the kindest thing Steve has ever seen him do. But then, he isn’t sure that Reed would have thought to be kind in that way. Perhaps that’s what Tony finds so comforting about it; Reed does not typically have the emotional intelligence to dissemble. Instead, he throws himself into the data Tony has compiled with the kind of reckless abandon that Reed approaches any scientific inquiry.

“Have you taken any brain scans while you’re sleeping?” Reed asks.

Tony hasn’t.

Reed takes Tony back to the Baxter Building. There, he loses any semblance of normalcy. It’s always unnerved Steve, watching Reed work like this. Every part of him is in a different part of the room, doing a different thing. It’s enough to make even the most iron-stomached man flinch. He loops himself into accidental knots as he attaches Tony to various instruments, telemetry and all sorts of words that Steve doesn’t recognise flying over his head. He watches Tony be hooked up to machines he’s never seen before.

“If you’re sleeping but you’re not feeling rested, then there has to be observable phenomena to corroborate it. Even if the cause is supernatural. Perhaps Steve being active combined with your psychic connection to his spirit is preventing you from reaching true REM sleep. We won’t know until we run some tests, and I’d prefer to do everything at once since I know sleep isn’t always easy for you.”

“You could put me to sleep,” Tony offers, and Reed frowns.

“I’d prefer to observe your natural electroencephalographic readings before we venture into altered states.”

“I have years of brain scans for comparison-”

“And it’s good to have that pool of data to draw from, but for now this is how we’re doing it.”

Tony argues a bit longer, but it seems to mostly be for the fun of it. He closes his eyes and lies back on the padded bench… thing… Reed has strapped him into.

“I’m going to turn out the lights now. I’ll see you in the morning, Tony.”

“Mmk,” Tony says, yawning. “Night Reed.”

“Good night, Tony.”

It’s the closest Steve’s ever heard Reed’s voice get to openly fond. It’s the voice he uses around his family, his children. He reaches out and shuts down all of the unnecessary equipment in the lab, fingers moving over switches and levers. Eventually, the room goes dark and Reed takes his leave.

Steve does a circuit of the lab. He pokes at things, although he isn’t able to move anything in particular. He peeks his head inside of some things, then circles back to Tony’s body. He wonders if he should try to sleep himself.

A noise at the door of Reed’s lab makes him turn. There is a particular quality of sound when someone is trying not to be heard when they walk and doing a bad job of it. Anywhere else he might be worried, but Steve knows who lives in this building. He wanders over towards the door.

“Captain America?”

Steve freezes. His heart stutters in his noncorporeal chest.

“Hello?” he calls.

A pale, towheaded boy sticks head out from around the shadowed doorway. He blinks big blue eyes at Steve, dressed head to toe in pyjamas with cowboys and rearing horses printed all over his little body. He’s wearing spaceship socks and clutching a large plush cowboy that Steve recognises from a children’s film about talking toys.

“Hullo,” he says shyly. “Aren’t you dead?”

Steve lets out a slightly hysterical laugh. “Franklin Richards, you _miracle_.” He abruptly sits down on the ground, his whole body feeling weak. “Oh, God. Oh thank God.”

_Months_. Months and months and _months_ of nothing. God bless Reed Richards and his whole ridiculous brood.

“My mom says that to me all the time,” Franklin says curiously. He steps further into the room, his little brows furrowed together in a line. “Are you alright? Are you going to faint?”

“You can see me,” Steve says, dumbly.

“Of course I can see you.”

Steve closes his eyes, just for a second. He takes a shaky breath. He’s pretty sure he’s in actual shock.

“Captain America?”

Steve opens his eyes. “Franklin, I need you to help me out. I need to talk to your dad, okay? Can you go get him?”

Franklin frowns. “I’m not supposed to be outta bed,” he says, rocking back on his little socked feet. God but he’s precious. Steve’s probably smiling at him like a damned giddy loon. “I’ll get in trouble.”

Steve laughs shakily. He rubs his hands over his head. “This is a really important mission, Franklin. Only you can do it. You’d really be helping me out.”

Franklin considers this. He squints at Steve. “Daddy can’t see you, can he?” he asks.

Steve shakes his head, mute with gratitude and relief. He feels, embarrassingly, like he might cry.

_Look at this brilliant, beautiful kid,_ he wants to say to Tony. _Look at what our friends made._

“Nobody can see me except you,” he confesses. “You’re the first person I’ve been able to talk to since I died.”

“Sounds lonely,” Franklin tells him seriously.

“You have no idea.” He is, maybe, feeling a little too emotional to hide the truth of himself from this preternaturally intelligent, extraordinarily powerful boy.

Franklin nods. “You’re not a stranger, so it’s alright if I hug you,” he says. “Do you need a hug?”

“You probably can’t touch me,” Steve says sadly. For all that Reed’s absent-minded, he’s clearly done so right by his kids. Steve’s never been close to Reed the way Tony is, but he considers himself pretty good friends with Sue. He thinks after this is over he’s going to owe the Richards a debt that can never be repaid. “But when I’m better, I’d love a hug.”

Franklin frowns. A determined expression that is purely Sue Storm appears on his face. He takes a few steps forward, until they’re eye to eye, and reaches one little hand out.

He pats Steve gently on the shoulder.

Steve lets out a broken sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Oh,” he says.

“Do you want a hug now?” Franklin asks him, and Steve nods. “Okay. And then I’ll go get daddy for you. Even if I’ll get in trouble.”

Steve has seen a lot of things in his long life. Bad things, of course. Death camps. Mass graves. Personal losses, too, which were often more impactful. He knows, better than Tony probably thinks he does, how difficult it can be to just accept a win in their line of work. It can be hard to remember the good things, too: home, and shared meals, and family. Long, sweaty games of basketball. The lightness of being when he clicks together with Tony on the field, and everything moves like a well-oiled machine, and everybody lives.

For the first time since his death, here in Franklin Richards’ tiny arms, he feels like he can breathe again. It is maybe the best feeling he’s ever felt in the world.

“It’ll be okay,” Franklin tells him. He squeezes Steve around the neck as tightly as his little arms can manage. It’s plenty tight for a child. “Wait here, okay?”

“I will.”

Franklin fixes him with a solemn look. He pats Steve on the head.

“Don’t be sad,” he tells Steve. “Daddy will help you.”

“I’m counting on it,” Steve tells him. He means it wholeheartedly. “Thank you, Franklin.”

Franklin beams at him. He clutches his stuffed friend to his chest. Then he turns and sets off at a run, peeling down the hall faster than Steve can manage to tell him to slow down.

Steve glances back over his shoulder. Tony is still fast asleep, the wires still trailing from every square inch of his skull. He looks peaceful. Beautiful.

Steve pushes to his feet and walks over, perching one hip on the edge of the sleeping bench.

“It won’t be long, now,” he tells him. He brushes the hair off of Tony’s forehead. He cups his cheek when he turns his face into Steve’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tangential author rant] It feels (to me) like there's this weird phenomenon where everyone in fandom thinks Tony and Reed don't get along which...? Isn't canon....??? Unless you're writing Ults, of course. Is that where that comes from? Natasha is also a horrific fucking person in Ults and I don't see the same thing happening with her, although I guess we have the MCU to have balanced that out. In my MCU fics I generally leave Reed out because there's no crossover, but in comics they are like...best buds. Where does that come from? I'm not the only one seeing that, right?
> 
> Anyway, I looked kind of desperately for that really cute page of Tony and Reed singing along to the radio and driving together but I couldn't find it, so if someone wants to hit me in the comments w/ a link that would be great. The true comics #ScienceBros (for those of us who like to forget about Hank Pym on account of him being an abusive husband in Ults and a crappy one in 616 lol.) [/rant]


	8. one notch below bedlam

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're all enjoying deus ex Franklin, because he was super fun to write. This fic honestly made me want to write kidfic, which is something I've never wanted to do haha. Maybe I'll give Steve/Tony from Dream of Bells some kids. His characterisation is almost entirely based off of the comic where he and Val fight Norman Osborn, because I don't read F4 unfortunately. I know a little bit from looking in on the Fantastic Fam from other comics, but I don't read much of their stuff directly. Sorry if anything feels off to anyone.
> 
> warning: Steve and Tony discuss the consent issues of their first encounter. it is resolved with no hurt feelings, but it is discussed. also there's more sexy times alluded to in here, but it is explicit consent. it's also not graphic, so imo also fine for sex-repulsed people, but ofc your mileage may vary.
> 
> Chapter title is also from ["My God It's Full of Stars"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55519/my-god-its-full-of-stars) by Tracy K. Smith

> _Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth  
>    
>  __Toward God-knows-where?_ I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone  
>  One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.  
>  Our eyes adjust to the dark.
> 
> – Tracy K. Smith, “My God It's Full of Stars"

There was very little sleep to be had for the rest of the night.

Franklin, Steve could tell, was quite delighted to have a position of such importance. Tony had retreated to the bathroom to wash the goop from the electrodes out of his hair and cried, Steve hopes for the last time, in the shower where he could maintain a piece of his dignity. It was sheer relief that graced him when he stepped out and onto the clean tile. It was like he was an entirely different man.

There’s so little they understand about Franklin’s powers. He is beyond Omega level, but he’s still young. All they know is what they can observe.

What they can observe is, in a word, sobering.

“He’s a reality warper, like-” Tony cuts himself off, thankfully before Sue can say anything to stop him. Her expression is sharp. Steve thinks that perhaps there is a reason that it took so long for Reed to notice that one of his closest friends had become a gaunt hermit, and it was because his much more gregarious wife was still angry at Tony for the War. Sue was fierce as ever as she stood with her hands on her hips in her pyjamas, surveying her family with an unimpressed glare.

Reed, clearly torn between his duties as a parent, his ethics and morals, and his scientific curiosity, says nothing to that. He wisely keeps his head down and studies the readouts from Tony’s single REM cycle, one hand braced against Franklin’s shoulder. Franklin has taken it upon himself to cling to Steve’s shin.

“This way everyone will know where you are,” he’d explained to Steve.

Steve, embarrassingly, was so relieved at the comfort of touching another living human being that he’d even let Franklin crawl onto his shoulders at one point. “Does it look like I’m floating?” he’d asked Tony.

“It sure does, buddy,” Tony had managed, his eyes wide. If they were a little damp, no one called him on it. Not even Sue.

“Just like when Mom holds me while she’s invisible!”

Reed hmms at something on the readout, curious enough that Sue takes a break from her glowering to peek over his shoulder. Reed reclaims his hand from his son’s shoulders as he and Sue enter deep into a discussion about psionics and astral projection, and Franklin sighs and turns to Tony with a beleaguered expression that has no business on the face of a small child.

“It’s okay,” Franklin says. “I know about the Scarlet Witch. But I’m not like _her_.” He puts his hands on his hips, the spitting image of his mother. “I’m gonna be a _real_ superhero. A good one.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Tony whispers loudly. He glances around to great effect, and Franklin blinks wide eyes at him. He nods, and Steve’s heart melts a little when Tony crouches down to reach him. He leans in to whisper in Franklin’s ear. “You already are a real superhero. Because you’re helping us save Captain America.”

Franklin pulls back abruptly, a big grin bursting over his face. “Woah.”

Tony laughs. He glances up to approximately where he must think Steve’s head should be. It’s closer to his neck from where he’s crouched on the floor, but the considering expression on his face is relaxed. Amused, almost.

“What’s he wearing?” Tony asks Franklin. “I’ve been wondering this whole time.”

Franklin wrinkles his nose. “Bloody clothes. They were probably nice before, but now they’re pretty icky.”

Tony’s face wipes clean of all mirth, and Sue scoops her son up into her arms and scowls out across the whole room.

“Okay, honey, time for bed,” she says with the kind of ebullient false cheer that parents have been perfecting for aeons. She glances over towards Steve. “Sorry, Steve.”

“It’s alright,” he says easily. He feels light as a feather now. Franklin dutifully repeats his words. “Good night Franklin. Thank you again.”

“Good night Captain America. Good night Tony.”

Tony grins at Franklin even as Sue’s face practically turns to stone. “Night little man. Tell your sister I said hey.”

“Do not wake up your sister,” Sue says sternly.

Tony winks at Franklin. He is not successful at hiding his giggle from his mother. “Night Sue.”

Sue, predictably, leaves without another word. The last thing Steve sees is Franklin waving at him over his shoulder. He waves back until the boy is out of sight.

“Boy is she still mad at me,” Tony mutters. He heaves a tired breath and pushes himself to his feet. “So some things went south. Bad calls were made. I fucked up. Undisputable. But now we’ve got a safety network for kids like Franklin. The ones who don’t have amazing, superpowered parents. We didn’t have that before.”

Reed turns to glance at Tony over his shoulder, one eyebrow raising almost comically. There is an uncomfortably inhuman quality to his expression when he loses track of himself like this: like he’s a caricature of himself.

“Who are you telling?”

“Me, probably,” Steve says with even humour. “And here I am, unable to argue with you.”

Tony shrugs. He wanders over to the console, leaning into Reed’s space so he can glance over the readouts. “Oh.”

“Right?”

Tony frowns. He pushes Reed out of the way, and Reed lets him. He glances around, yawns, pulls his limbs back into his pyjamas proper. Then he turns and switches to another monitor.

“The problem, I think, is that Sue and I are equals,” he says.

Tony stills. He turns around to look at Reed with what Steve can only describe as incredulity.

“Are you giving me relationship advice now?”

Reed hums. He flicks something on his screen over to Tony’s. “I’m making an observation.” He reaches over to Tony’s screen, enlarges a graph. “Look at this.”

Tony looks. He frowns at it. “This isn’t right.”

“Mm.” Reed pulls up another graph, then arranges them for comparison. Whatever it is they’re seeing makes Tony frown even harder. “What I mean to say is that you hold yourself in lower esteem than you do Steve. You put Steve on a pedestal.”

Tony stiffens. “Reed,” he says thinly, “you know he can hear you-”

“So?”

Tony sighs. He turns back to the monitor, pulls up another data log. He pushes something back towards the monitor Reed is using, which apparently startles him so much that his head comes down to squint more closely at the screen, his neck stretching like taffy.

“It’s easy to say no to things,” Reed says absently. He’s paging through Tony’s brain scans now, fingers tracing the shapes, peaks and valleys. Steve wonders what it is that he sees. “To look down on them. When all you do is criticise and refuse to offer concrete solutions to problems, it’s easy to always be right.”

“Yes, say what you really think,” Steve says wryly. He’d be offended, but he knows Reed doesn’t mean anything by it.

“That’s not fair,” Tony says tiredly.

Reed shrugs. “You and Steve work best together when you are _working_ _together_ : two unalike minds in tandem, ideas bouncing off of each other. You fail when he refuses to engage you. You fall apart.” He reaches out and touches Tony’s shoulder, gently enough. He doesn’t look away from what he’s doing at all, but the soft touch is enough to make Tony relax. He takes a deep breath, lets it fill him full before relaxing back onto Reed’s hand. “Your true magnificence lies in your omnidirectional intelligence. You need sounding boards, to help you corral your own ever-expanding mind. You’ve never had the focus I do.”

“Hey now,” Tony says, but there’s no heat in it. Reed is as notorious for his tunnel vision as Tony is for his distractibility. It is indisputable: facts of their universe.

“It’s not a disparagement, Tony. I just mean that when you and Steve are good, you’re a better scientist. A better man. And so is he. Steve needs someone to help make his ideals real. Otherwise they’re just dreams. Civil War wasn’t the first time you’d had a major disagreement, but it was the first time he wasn’t willing to listen to you. You were speaking to air.”

Steve, who has thought this more than once since his death, cannot protest this. He and Tony have a lot to talk about when he’s alive again.

And it’s stupid, because Steve has spent years and years fighting himself. He’d been desperate to keep the balance between them, to keep Tony not too close and yet not too far, near and dear while still professional. _Brotherly_. The word spits in his mind like an angry, bitter thing. It hurts, to know that all he’d had to do, all this time, was let himself fall.

It’s too easy to imagine the way the years might have played out differently if he’d just given in: no Sunset, or Tiberius, or Madame Mask for God’s sake. No War. But there are parts, too, that they would both have been sorry to miss. Rumiko. Sharon.

“Like you and Sue?” Tony says, a small smirk on his face.

Reed shrugs. “Sue makes me a better man,” he agrees. “Tony, you do know what this means.”

Tony hums. A strange expression crosses his face. Rare, to see something in Tony that he does not recognise. It’s there and gone in an instant, but something about it niggles at Steve’s mind. When has he seen Tony look like that before?

“It means I’ve got to go back to the workshop and dust off some analytic programs I haven’t had to run in a very long time.”

Reed smiles: it’s an uncanny, wise sort of smile. There is an age to him that separates him from Tony. If asked, Steve might attribute it to his years of fatherhood. He’s been the patriarch of a family longer than he’s been a childless superhero now, and it shows sometimes in little ways. He’s never had the boundless enthusiasm and spark that makes Tony run and run and run until he collapses under his own exhaustion.

“A way forward,” he says.

Steve feels the shaky, nakedly grateful smile that breaks over Tony’s face like it his own body: the ache in his cheeks, the heaviness of unshed tears in his throat. The tingle of his skin right before Reed claps a hand to Tony’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” Tony manages.

Reed nods at him. Then he turns back to the monitor, and the moment is broken.

\--

The weird thing, Tony explains when Steve is able to stop him long enough to tap the question out, is that Tony’s brain is exhibiting some unusual symptoms of stress that both he and Reed recognise. Apparently, Tony’s body is reacting the same way it used to when he pushed Extremis to its farthest limits. Of course, Tony hasn’t been able to actively engage with Extremis in a very long time. Sure, his healing factor is a little better than the average baseline human, and he’s more spry than many men his age. But he hasn’t been able to control it the way he used to since before he wiped his brain and kind of maybe died. So there’s no reason for it to be taxing his system.

“Unless, of course, what’s stopping you from healing isn’t magical, but technological,” he says. He’s exhibiting the kind of mania that Steve knows well: too long spent working and too many cups of caffeine. His brain is racing two hundred miles faster than his mouth, the evidence of it shown in how many screens Tony has up and running, the electrodes hooked up to his brain spitting out readings that Friday and him are interpreting and using to recalibrate scans faster than Steve can even parse what he’s looking at.

E X P L A I N, Steve taps, because he doesn’t think Tony will stand still long enough to let him get out all the questions he wants to ask.

“Well, why else would only I be able to interact with you?” Tony asks. He turns around to gesture in the general direction of Steve. “Not Strange, or Xavier, or any of the other telepaths or magic users. My tenure as a technopath is the only thing that sets me apart, and is the only real way to explain why I would be the sole person able to receive input from your mostly-dormant brain. Which begs the question: how is Extremis gathering the data that I’m translating into touch? And where is the output coming from? There has to be some kind of data stream we’re able to track, and that puts this problem squarely back in my wheelhouse, not Reed’s. This kind of sleuthing is old hat for us, isn’t it Fri?”

“Leave it to us, Captain.”

Steve can’t help but smile.

\--

Their first breakthrough comes with unexpected results.

Tony has been fiddling with a vast array of sensors for the past few days, trying to find what it is that’s projecting Steve into Tony’s brain.

S O M E T I M E S I F E E L L I K E W E A R E O N E, Steve tells him, and Tony pauses with his hands in a hologram, his eyes blinking in that way that says: processing, please hold.

“Sentimental of you,” he jokes, but he turns around to face Steve, waving the displays away. “I’ve felt it too, I think. When you’re angsting about something particularly hard, it’s like I’m feeling an emotion that isn’t mine. I get the physiological response of grief or desire without the thought.”

Steve flushes. D E S I R E he says, and Tony winks at him. His gaze goes half-lidded, pulling carnality over himself like a well-worn fur meant for luxuriating in. It warms Steve down to his toes.

“Why so shy now, Captain? Or was it someone else that decided to peep on me while I was having a private moment of pleasure?”

Y O U I N V I T E D M E, Steve protests, and his whole face feels hot. He feels like he’s going to float away. For weeks Tony refused to talk about it, and this is not at all how he’d imagined this conversation going. He wishes he had a better way to communicate, but there’s no way they can get Franklin to be their intermediary for this one.

“I wasn’t even sure you were real,” Tony laughs. Seeing him jocular for the first time since Steve’s death takes the sting out of the implication that maybe Steve wasn’t as welcome as he thought he was. Even still, it pulls at something in his chest. Makes him ache. “Don’t fret, dear.”

Tony knows him far too well. He didn’t need the added advantage of a psychic connection to read him. He didn’t even need to see his face.

I M S O R R Y, Steve says anyway. It makes Tony’s eyes crinkle at him, a smile lighting up his face.

“I’m not,” he says. He reaches a tentative hand out, gets it around Steve’s wrist. He follows his arm up to his shoulder, his neck, his cheek. He brushes his thumb over the soft skin beneath Steve’s left eye.

“Tony,” Steve breathes, but he knows he can’t hear him.

“There are so many things I want to ask you,” Tony says, and Steve nods. His heart jumps into his throat as Tony leans in, brushes their noses together. “Steve.”

“Yes.”

“Kiss me, you fool.”

“That line was old when I was young,” Steve says, rolling his eyes. Tony grins like he knows exactly what Steve said. Maybe he does. It makes the kiss awkward, filled with too many teeth, but Steve revels in it anyway. He presses close, rumbles a low groan when Tony gets a hand up into his hair. He pulls Tony flush up against his body.

“Shh,” Tony hushes him, pulling away. His mouth is red and wet. Steve wants to devour him. “Save it for when you’re back in your body.”

Steve doesn’t want to wait. He wants Tony now. He presses forward, sucks open-mouthed kisses along Tony’s jaw, his neck. He licks into the hollow of his throat.

“ _Steve_ ,” Tony gasps, and Steve smiles against the skin there. “Oh- wait-”

R U N Y O U R P R O G R A M, Steve taps into his ribs as he pulls Tony’s earlobe into his mouth. He bites down gently on the plush skin, and it makes Tony shudder under his hands.

“What?”

Steve groans quietly at the idea that Tony is so overcome that his beautiful brain hadn’t been able to parse Steve’s tapping. He sucks a kiss behind Tony’s ear, under his jaw. Then he pulls back slightly.

R U N T H E T E S T, he repeats. He kisses under Tony’s left eye, his closed eyelids, the bridge of his nose.

“Oh,” Tony says. He sucks in a startled breath. “Oh, wait, that’s actually a marvellous idea, Friday-”

“Yes, Boss?”

“We’re going to run a comprehensive analytics test.” He pulls away from Steve’s mouth a little, just enough to hook the wires up to the little metal bits that have remained all over his skull since he returned from the Baxter building. Steve mouths at the nape of his neck as he works on his temples, then switches back around to his front as he tries to do the back.

“Steve, this is not helping.”

Steve grins and takes one of the long, gorgeous tendons of Tony’s neck between his teeth. God, but he’s wanted to do that for years.

“Steve,” Tony groans, and Steve laughs, wicked and low against his skin. He traces his fingers over Tony’s hips, his hands moving over his body like his clothes aren’t even there. He hadn’t tried to touch him like this when Tony was fully clothed. All the other times Tony had undressed himself, had placed his handsome naked body into Steve’s care with all the reticence of a frightened animal. So he’s never noticed that before, that he can’t feel Tony’s clothing when he touches him. Only his skin, warm and smooth and alive.

This is a different man than he’s tasted. This Tony is delightful and impish in turns. He laughs. He gives himself up to pleasure as easy as breathing, as though this is precisely what he was built for. He is shameless. He takes and takes and takes everything Steve wants to give him, opens himself up like the lushest fruit under Steve’s hands and mouth, ripe for the feasting. It’s heady, this power, Tony Stark naked and gasping and so incredibly beautiful under his hands. It makes him greedy. It makes him ravenous. It makes him ache for a body that can lift Tony up and press him into the wall, manhandle him, leave bruises imprinted into his flawless olive skin.

“I love you,” Steve confesses, mouth pressed to the space over Tony’s heart. Perhaps he is a coward after all. He knows Tony cannot hear him, but it feels so good to say it out loud. It feels like letting go of a weight he has been carrying all his life.

Eventually, Tony lies boneless in one of the rolling chairs he uses to scoot around the workshop. His eyes are wide in his face, breath still coming in pants. Steve is collapsed over him, straddling his lap, head braced on his shoulder. He traces lazy patterns over the starburst that faintly graces Tony’s sternum. He presses his palm flat to the skin, tries to feel for a heartbeat. Unnervingly, he isn’t able to feel it. It makes his heart stutter in his chest, and he presses closer. He tucks his face into Tony’s neck.

Tony hums a soft, questioning noise. He traces the bowed curve of Steve’s spine, fingers dipping into the crease. The callouses on his hands are rough, and the scrape of them over his skin makes Steve shiver with aftershocks against Tony’s body. It’s enough to make Tony grin, his eyes still shut tight.

He knows why Tony always keeps his eyes closed when they are intimate together, but it still hurts. He wants nothing more than to see Tony’s stormy blue eyes trained on him as his lover comes apart under his hands.

Tony stills under him. He blinks, then struggles a little to sit up. Steve gamely sits back, balancing over Tony’s knees as the man shakes off the afterglow. A curious expression filters over his face, his brows coming together as he pulls up a display.

“What’d you find, Shellhead?” Steve asks him. He traces a hand over Tony’s nape, climbing out of his lap so that Tony can work. Regretfully, Tony leans down and pulls on his briefs and pants in one go. Steve watches him with open avarice. There’s no one to see him do it, and he can’t quite help himself. He feels _fantastic_.

“I’m going to try something,” is all the warning Steve gets. Steve raises his eyebrows, reaches out to tap a question into Tony’s shoulder. He doesn’t get the chance before his body is slipping away, being compressed down the way he’s used to feeling when he travels between his body and Tony. The world peels away from him, Tony as well, and he squeezes his eyes shut at the disorienting feeling of it happening without his intent.

The rush of the world around him feels longer this time. He has just long enough to be terrified that something went wrong, that he’s stuck, before he is spat back out somewhere he’s never been before.

Steve takes a second to get his bearings. He’s completely disoriented, his mind still in a state of deep lassitude after taking the time to thoroughly explore Tony’s body until he’d begged. God, the man was unreal.

Steve shakes his head a little, a slight blush coming to him as he tries to get his mind on right. He’s standing on poured concrete, in some sort of cavernous space. It’s bright, lit by the kind of overhead lights that Steve has only ever seen in underfunded hospitals and depressing office buildings. It was evening in New York, and it seems like it’s probably some time outside of the workday here too, wherever here is. There’s no one in the building.

Steve glances around at the cubicles and scattered desks in the small area he’s in. There are a handful of fans around the place, and everything is pinned down with staplers or cups of pens or, rarely, actual paperweights. Somewhere warm, then. He glances over what things are out, and his eyebrows raise as he chances upon an unopened letter left in a mail bin on someone’s desk.

Jessie Diaz  
R.O.C. Tampa Branch Laboratory  
3602 Spectrum Blvd  
Tampa, FL 33612

“Holy damn,” Steve says. A grin breaks over his face. “Tony, you marvel.”

He turns and looks around with newly informed eyes. There’s a hall visible to his left, lined with heavy steel doors, and he makes his way towards them. As he gets closer he can see various warnings on the signs, lights that go on when the rooms aren’t to be entered. No one’s here, and so Steve slips through one door. He can’t make heads or tails of most of what he’s looking at, but he makes sure to consign everything that looks vaguely important to relate to Tony and Reed and Franklin later to his memory.

He doesn’t expect a smoking gun, and he doesn’t get one. As far as he can tell, this is just a corporate lab. But it’s a development, and their first real evidence that Reed and Tony are on to something.

Eventually, a familiar tug makes Steve’s breastbone ache something fierce. He closes his eyes, compresses himself down, and lets the data stream he’s been riding without knowing it all this time take him back to where he belongs.


	9. Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: some internalised homophobia, gender bias, a whole boatload of feels
> 
> Chapter title is from Neruda's ["Here I Love You"](https://overtheandes.com/2018/10/17/pablo-nerudas-here-i-love-you/)

> You will love again the stranger who was your self.  
> Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart  
> To itself, to the stranger who has loved you  
>   
> All your life, whom you ignored  
> For another, who knows you by heart.  
> Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,  
>   
> The photographs, the desperate notes,  
> Peel your image from the mirror.  
> Sit. Feast on your life.
> 
> – Derek Walcott, "Love After Love"

Tony is halfway back to despair when he returns. His hands—ever steady as they solder and spot weld, as they build the shape of new machines, new beings—tremble ever so slightly as they reach out, fingers spread, searching for Steve in the open air. When Steve goes to him, worried that his ability to touch will fail him in this crucial moment, Tony takes his face between his calloused palms and presses their foreheads together. He closes his eyes and breathes in and out, as though he’s trying to remember Steve’s scent.

“I think we’re done for the day,” Steve tells him. He taps as much into his skin.

“Where’d you go?” Tony persists, and Steve huffs a sigh.

T O M O R R O W, he insists, but Tony is the same, dogged mad man he’s always loved. It’s a treat, in some ways, to see him like this again. But right now Steve mostly just wants to take him to bed. T O N Y.

“Steve,” Tony says patiently, and Steve sighs. He rolls his eyes heavenward.

F I N E, he tells him. T H E N S L E E P.

Tony struggles to bear letting Steve take care of him. Steve knows this, because he knows Tony, but also because it is plain to see. Tony wears his guilt like a mourning shroud, and it does not matter that it was not his fault. Steve could tell him so until he was blue in the face, for years, and it still would not make a dent. He knows this from experience. From his last death. He wonders if there is a death that Tony would not blame himself for, and finds that his mind comes up empty. Tony would always blame himself: for not being there, for being there and not moving fast enough, for not creating something to protect his loved ones, for not dying first.

 _But no_ , Steve thinks. _Tony would blame himself even in death._

He is not feeling particularly charitable towards Tony’s self-deprecation. Instead, he waits while Tony and Friday do a bit of digital sleuthing, trying to find a connection between Roxxon’s lab and Steve’s murder. He lets one hour slide by and then he wraps a steady arm around Tony’s waist, pulling him meaningfully away from the console and pressing his nose behind Tony’s ear.

“Come on, Cap, I’ve barely touched the surface-”

B E D, he taps onto Tony’s hipbone. It makes Tony shiver in his arms, and Steve presses his smile to the warm, dewy curve of Tony’s neck. R E S T.

“Steve,” Tony complains, but he lets Steve drag him towards the elevator without fighting his embrace.

L O N G D A Y, Steve chides him. He guides Tony’s hand to the elevator button. T O M O R R O W.

Tony huffs a put upon sigh. He presses the button for the elevator and lets Steve coax him inside.

They don’t run into anyone in the elevators, thankfully. Tony performs his nightly ablutions without much fanfare, and Steve watches him while sitting on the bathroom counter, his knee and shin flush with Tony’s side as he brushes his teeth, washes his face, puts all sorts of products on his olive skin that make it gleam in the warm pendant lights that hang decadently overhead. He follows Tony into bed when he climbs in clad only in clinging black briefs, doesn’t even bother to try to keep his hands to himself. Instead he cuddles up and around him, pulling Tony’s face into his neck and rubbing his hands over the firm, rolling planes of Tony’s strong back. He imagines having a body again, Tony underneath him, watching the muscles flex as Tony writhes in the sheets. It’s enough to make him inhale, shuddering and slow.

Tony melts underneath his ministrations. His breathing deepens, and he presses his face into Steve’s skin, eyes closed. There’s a tension to him that won’t leak out: a small sliver of it, in his shoulders and fingers, like he’s holding on to something. Steve pets him along his spine and waits. He knows Tony has never been afraid to speak his mind. He will say what he wants to say when he’s ready to say it.

“Peter was right,” Tony says, finally. He sucks in a slow breath, turns on his back and flops like a starfish. He stares sightlessly at the ceiling. “I haven’t been subtle. I’m not a subtle man.”

 _I was waiting for you_ , he doesn’t say, but Steve hears it as loud as if he’d shouted it.

“Tony,” Steve sighs. They’re barely touching, now: just their hands, fingers lightly resting together in a cage of flesh and bone on the sheets between them. He strokes a careful thumb over Tony’s fingers.

Steve’s thought a lot about what he’ll say when Tony eventually asks the question of him. He knows it’s coming, has known since the first time Tony let him touch his skin. Still, he doesn’t know how to articulate what he feels. Felt. Feels? He certainly can’t articulate it in Morse, limited as he is.

Sometimes, you want something for so long it becomes abstract. It’s something you stare at through a shop window, desperate and hungry and knowing you can never have it. It would be easy to think that Tony’s lived too rich of a life to know that feeling, but Steve knows better. He knows that Tony spent most of his life that way: desperate for the life that he saw other families have, on television and all around him, and never ever getting the love and affection that all children expect by right. It’s funny sometimes, the dichotomy of that: Steve so, so loved and too poor to buy shoes; and Tony, so lonely and yet surrounded by all the things money could buy. Other times, it makes Steve wonder what it is that kept Tony good, what it is that separates him from all of the terrible, hurt, powerful men they go out and fight week after week. There is something inside Tony that is, just as he claims, made of iron: strong and unbreakable and absolutely true. Modest, even. It is the source of the driving hunger that lives inside of his brilliant, untameable mind. It is the fact that Tony is at his happiest two days into no sleep, smeared up and down with grease and sweat, deep into his engineering mania. There is no purer form to him that that central, unchangeable essence of him. Everything else—the clothes, and the cars, and the models, and the parties—all of it was a smokescreen that hid this man, fragile and aching for someone to see him. Really, truly see him.

Steve was lucky enough to have been gifted that truth years ago. He thinks, perhaps, that his worst sin is forgetting it. He’d been given a precious gift and he’d squandered it.

“Steve?” Tony says, and Steve takes his wrist in one hand. He presses his lips to the pulse there.

“It’s like,” he says, knowing Tony can’t hear him and feeling equally as though he cannot stay silent and a deep gratefulness for the time to work his thoughts out aloud. “It’s like when my ma managed to get something nice for me. Like a chocolate bar. And I’d hoard it and hoard it and hoard it, sometimes until it was crumbling and stale, because the idea of eating it was so daunting. What if there was never any more?”

There was a little tin first aid box his mother had nicked from the hospital. The hinge was busted, and they were probably going to just toss it out and buy a new one. So she’d brought it home and given it to Steve to keep his treasures in: good brushes and nibs, charcoal and ink. Little bits and bobs he’d pick up here and there. Things he didn’t want the mice to get into. He imagines opening it up now, Tony’s picture lying in the bottom alongside all his childhood treasures.

“I couldn’t lose you,” he tries to explain. “I thought you understood.”

So maybe Tony had been right. Maybe there was a part of him that had been, how did he phrase it? Dedicated to Victorian-era pining from afar? He strokes his thumb over the papery skin of Tony’s wrist, uses Tony’s hand to cup his own cheek. He presses an apologetic kiss to the palm of his hand. He wishes more than anything that he could have the scent of Tony’s skin: warm salt, orange pumice soap, the fancy herbal-smelling shampoos and deodorants he uses. He closes his eyes, presses a kiss to Tony’s knuckles.

“Reed told me there’s another universe where I’m a woman and we got married the day you died,” Tony says. There is no inflection in his voice, almost like he’s commenting on the weather, and so it takes Steve a moment to process what he’s saying. Then his heart picks up, thundering in his ears like a drum.

“What?” he says. He traces a question mark onto the back of Tony’s hand.

“The time before, I mean. At the courthouse.” Tony explains. “He thought he was being kind, or something, probably.”

Steve sucks in a shaking breath. His mouth feels dry as parchment, and he is aware for what feels like the first time since he’s died of the desire for water. W H A T A B O U T S H R A

“They worked it out like adults.” Tony laughs: a wild, bitter sound. It curdles Steve’s blood in his noncorporeal veins. “I suppose the optics of us brawling in the street are very different with a romantic, heterosexual couple. Punching your wife is a bad look, no matter what the issue is.”

Steve flinches. His fingers tighten reflexively around Tony’s.

“Steve?”

O U C H, he taps. His chest feels tight.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Tony says, waving his free hand. “Reed was just talking shit. The fault is mine.”

Steve doesn’t know how to say what he wants to say. He doesn’t have the space, in his brain or his chest. He doesn’t have the ability to make Tony hear him.

“What are you saying?” he whispers.

Because, what, they’re…both men? That Steve hit him because he didn’t love him enough, didn’t love him the way he would love a woman?

He imagines Tony’s face under the curve of his shield. He remembers blood splattered across the metal, hands pulling him up and off of Tony’s snarling, wild-eyed body. The way fear and fury had warred across his eyes like snarling dogs, twisting his expression into something ruthless and forbidding.

He imagines Tony’s face softened, his dark-lashed eyes in a rounder cheek, fuller lips. He imagines punching that woman in the face, and discomfort curls into his chest like an eel. He doesn’t know where it comes from. He’s fought female combatants before, hundreds of times. He’s sparred with every female Avenger on the roster. What is that? What is he feeling?

He’d never taken himself for the kind of man that held biases inside of him, deep down, lurking like a monster in the deep of his soul. He feels unclean, suddenly. He wants to wash himself clean.

Is that all it took, Tony having different parts? Is that all that Steve was, in the end—a bigoted bully who’d hit his lover if they were a man, but not if they were a woman? Or was Tony so fundamentally a different person born as a woman that she would abandon her ideals for love of him? The idea of his Tony capitulating to his anger in order to appease him makes something foul curdle into his bowels. He wants to be ill. He knows, intimately, what Tony’s own demons can so easily convince him of: that he is unworthy of love and that he must prove himself. Was the other Tony like that? What was so different about them, that had led them down this murky and distorted road?

“Steve,” Tony murmurs. He curls back into the lee of Steve’s body. He presses their foreheads together, their noses. He presses a gentle kiss to Steve’s frowning mouth. “Don’t obsess. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

Steve shakes his head. There are so many things he wants to say. He wraps a hand around Tony’s wrist where he’s cupped Steve’s face, presses his thumb to the veins and wishes he could feel enough to count his pulse.

“I know I fucked up. I still-…” Tony sucks in a shuddering breath. “God knows I have so many regrets. But I do genuinely think that the system we have in place right now is better than no system at all. It took us a while to get here, but we were doing so good, weren’t we? We’d…it seemed like-”

Y E S, Steve taps, because the faltering expression on Tony’s face is too much for him to bear. W E W E R E

“I never thought…after everything I’ve done, I never thought you’d forgive me,” Tony says quietly. He speaks it like a secret, like a confession, and Steve turns and presses a kiss to his open palm. “I don’t deserve it. But then when it happened, I thought, of course. Of course you’d forgive me. You’re a better man than I am. But I…I can’t understand now, why you’d…”

Steve grips Tony’s wrist with punishing force. He presses his face to his palm hard, rolls his head back and forth against Tony’s dry, calloused skin. He takes his free hand and presses his palm over Tony’s heart, and taps the only thing he can think to say into his skin.

F O R G I V E E A C H O T H E R

Tony chokes out a laugh.

F O R G I V E Y O U

Tony shakes his head. “I know you have,” he begins, but Steve taps again.

Y O U F O R G I V E Y O U

“Steve.” Tony shudders, and so Steve tells him again.

F O R G I V E Y O U R S E L F

“I can’t,” Tony whispers.

Y E S Y O U C A N

There are more things Steve wants to say. That it isn’t easy, and that he’s still trying to forgive himself. That he forgave Tony a long time ago. That he would love Tony even if he hadn’t forgiven him, had loved him even as they fought. But he doesn’t say any of those things. Instead he leans forward and crushes his mouth to Tony’s to stop his protestations, sliding his hand up Tony’s chest to cup the nape of his neck. He drowns Tony’s self-doubt in desire.

It is a temporary stopgap, but it is all he has until he can speak the words he means to say with his mouth.

* * *

In the end, it’s Bethany Cabe who cracks the code.

She waltzes into Tony’s workshop with the same aplomb as always: completely sure of her welcome, head held high. She waves a tablet in one hand above her head, her sea-glass eyes bright with excitement.

“I’ve got a lead.”

“Hit me,” Tony says immediately. He turns off his soldering iron, sets it aside. Steve wanders over towards him and places a hand on his shoulder, wanting to be close in case the news is bad. He smiles when Tony leans back a little against his chest.

“So I ran with the info you gave me, put some feelers out. There have been two deaths in the last year that match the MO, but they’re pretty low-level, which is why it took a sec for them to register.” Beth gestures to a holoscreen and does something on her phone, obviously sending Friday the files. A photo of an androgynous young East Asian person with short green hair pops up. “Thanks Fri. This is Avery Yamashita, an environmentalist lobbyist and podcaster. Killed quietly on their way home from work. It was investigated as a possible hate crime, then mysteriously classed as a mugging gone wrong, even though there was $36 in cash left in their wallet. Supposedly the cops couldn’t find a phone or laptop and that’s the motive. Can’t really tell if it’s corruption and someone was paid off or it’s just your garden-variety transphobia from the Baltimore PD, but I’m betting on the former.”

“Hate both those options,” Tony says, and Beth snorts.

“Send a check to NYC AVP later,” she quips. She reaches out and slides another screen open. “This is a rag journalist, Lucas Garcia Thomas. Fancies himself the next Eddie Brock. He’s run a bunch of fishily-sourced ‘exposés’ on corporations doing illegal, reprehensible, generally not-good things. Lots of Twitter followers. Runs a sensationalist blog where he posts his more out-there conspiracies, the stuff even the rags won't run.”

“Let me guess, both tie back to Roxxon?”

Beth whirls to face him and levels him with a sharp look. “How did you know?”

Tony sighs. He’s still been reticent to tell people about Steve, even now when he has evidence and witnesses to back his claim. With a few gestures, he brings up more files: crime scene photos, ME reports, DNA testing. “These were a warm-up,” he deflects. “To get noticed. Appetisers.”

“You think Steve was the main course.”

“I think whoever it was got hired to do exactly this but on a bigger scale. And so far, they’ve gotten away with it.” He frowns. “I need to call Maria. And Reed. And probably some other people.”

“Why?”

“Because our only lead is in Tampa, FL. If I want to run a non-Avengers recon mission under such thin pretences, I need to fill out an annoying amount of paperwork.”

Beth smiles. She reaches out and claps a hand to his shoulder, her eyes bright. “Give me what you’ve got and I’ll do some digging while you make your phone calls.”

“You’re the best, Bethie.”

Beth laughs and goes up on tiptoe to kiss Tony’s cheek. “And don’t you forget it, mister.”

\--

Tony calls Reed, then Maria. Maria, thankfully, refuses to let Tony go alone.

“Take Spiderman.”

“Spiderman?” Tony repeats, baffled. “Why?”

On the screen, Maria folds her arms across her chest. She’s somewhere in the field, because the wall behind her is brick, nothing like the gleaming steel and glass of SHIELD. There’s a small cut below her right eye. She looks tired, but also cautiously optimistic. “Because he stood by you.”

Surprise breaks over Tony’s face like a wave cresting smooth rocks. “A surprisingly sentimental reason from you, Hill.”

“You’ll need his help to convince Danvers.”

“What?” Tony says. He gestures threateningly at the holoscreen with a screwdriver. “No way, she’s busy.”

“Danvers will make both of our lives a living hell if you don’t take her.”

Tony clearly has nothing to say to that. He huffs a put-upon sigh. “I want Rhodey.”

“Obviously.”

Tony hesitates. “And Bucky.”

Steve’s brows raise, but Maria seems unsurprised by this as well. “You know where he is?”

“I might.”

“Fine.” A small smile cracks Maria’s stern expression. “Don’t do anything stupid, Tony.”

“Moi?” Tony presses a hand to his chest, then offers her a wink. “I’m a genius, Maria. I could never.”

“Which makes it all the more galling that you choose to act stupid all the time.” She hangs up before Tony can retort, which is perhaps the most aggravating thing Maria could have done to Tony. He hates not getting the last word.

“Harpy,” Tony mutters, and Steve smothers a laugh. He swings his feet like a kid where he sits on one of Tony’s tall workbench tables, watching curiously as Tony pulls out an actual phone. It’s an old one, a burner, and Steve raises his eyebrows and scoots a little closer as the dial tone trills against Tony’s ear.

“Tony, everything ok?”

It’s Bucky. Steve raises his eyebrows, intrigued. He had no idea Bucky and Tony had a secret burner phone. Why on earth would they need that?

“Hey,” Tony says, awkward. He scratches at his facial hair. “Everything’s fine. I think. I’m, uh. I’m calling in that favour you keep saying you owe me.”

Bucky’s laugh is tinny through the little phone speaker. Steve leans closer, not quite close enough to touch Tony. He isn’t sure he wants Tony to know he’s eavesdropping so brazenly. “Oh really? I thought it wasn’t a favour-”

“Well, I kept saying that-”

“Because you’re an idiot who blames himself for Steve’s death.” Bucky snorts. “The last one. Although probably this one, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Tony prevaricates. He spins in a circle in his chair, then flips an idle hand through the data Beth brought in. He pauses on Avery Yamashita’s face. “Turns out Steve might be a little less dead than we thought.”

“Again?” Bucky sounds equal parts tired and unsurprised. Steve’s chest aches.

“Again,” Tony says. A wry twist takes over his mouth. “Interested?”

“You have to ask?” Bucky says. There’s the sound of movement on the other end. Steve imagines him grabbing a go bag, packing up his various weapons. “You could’ve sent me coordinates with no context and I’d still have shown up. You know that, right?”

“I don’t know that, actually.”

“I’d help you even if it had nothing to do with Steve,” Bucky continues, because he’s just as much of a meddling brat as he ever was, even now. He steamrolls right over Tony with cheerful Midwestern nicety, like the sky is blue and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, no sir.

“Don’t get all emotional on me now, Bucky Barnes. My heart can’t take it.”

Bucky snorts. There’s the tell-tale sound of a zipper being closed. “Sharon told me you used to be better at having friends.”

“Lies, all of it,” Tony says, but he’s smiling enough that it’s audible in his voice. “What would she know?”

“Well, I suspect that she thinks you’re friends, too, actually.”

Tony swallows his smile. His fingers pause mid-gesture. “Perish the thought,” he says, but his heart isn’t in it. Steve suspects he knows where Tony’s head is going, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He reaches a hand out, then lets it fall ineffectual into his lap. “Coordinates sent, no context, as requested.”

Bucky huffs a laugh. There’s a faint clink of metal on glass or ceramic. A drawer opens and shuts. “I’ll see you in Florida, Tony.”

“Give my best to the girls.”

“I’ll tell them you called ‘em _girls_ ,” Bucky threatens, and Tony laughs. The line cuts out.

“Since when are you and Bucky best buddies?” Steve asks him. He scrubs a hand over the back of his head, some cousin of jealousy bubbling up in his chest. It’s irrational. Stupid. But it’s what he’s feeling right now, dangerous and unbridled in his chest.

Alarmingly, Tony seems to know exactly what he’s thinking, because his head turns towards Steve. Amusement and shock war on his face before he seems to settle on amusement, and Steve remembers with a dizzying rush of embarrassment what Tony had said about sometimes being able to feel strong emotion. He reaches out and takes Tony’s closest hand into his lap.

S O R R Y

“Don’t be,” Tony says. He sounds almost gleeful, and Steve closes his eyes and resigns himself to what he expects will be a round of merciless teasing. “Good to remember you’re flawed.”

There is a moment where they are both, unspoken, reminded of what Reed said about pedestals and equal relationships. Tony has the grace to look sheepish, and Steve reaches out and shoves him down and ruffles his hair until Tony grins up at him from under his hand. Something about the boyish expression is enough to make Steve’s chest squirm with butterflies.

“It was after you died.” Tony pauses, and this time Steve mouths it along with him: “The time before. Obviously.”

I M G L A D Y O U H A D E A C H O T H E R, Steve tells him seriously. It’s a long sentence to tap out, but it feels important to say it right.

“You probably knew he and Sharon set up their little Halfway House for Second Chances, but I guess you didn’t know I got called in somewhat regularly to help Bucky out with his arm.” Tony sobers, reaching out blind until he catches a hand on Steve’s thigh. He rests it there, swiping his thumb back and forth. “I used to joke he’d get banged up just so I’d come out and see to it. But now, looking back, maybe there was a little truth in that. They were so isolated. And we all loved you, in our own ways.”

Steve can understand that quite well. He can imagine it easily, three of his favourite people holed up in a safehouse somewhere, chatting over beer and greasy takeout while Tony works on Bucky’s arm. The thought warms him, and he reaches out and squeezes Tony’s arm. He leans down, precarious, and presses his face to Tony’s temple. He smudges a kiss against his handsome cheek.

 _I love you._ He wants so badly to say it and have Tony hear him. _I love you. I want to come back to you. I want to stay._

“Soon,” Tony murmurs, as though he can hear him. He nudges Steve’s legs open, wheels his chair between them. He presses his cheek to Steve’s chest and wraps his arms around his waist.

Steve wraps him up as best as he can. He tucks his feet into the space between Tony’s back and the chair, smooths his hands over Tony’s back. He tucks Tony into the curve of his body.

“If this doesn’t work-” Tony tries, but Steve just squeezes him tighter, enough that that the breath rushes out of him in a gusting laugh. It shudders out between their bodies, and in that moment Steve wishes nothing more than that he could feel it: warm, humid breath, Tony’s scent in his nose. The grit and sweat and dirt that make a body, real and seething with blood under his hands.

“You never come with me when I fight,” Tony says when Steve releases him. He tips his face up, eyes searching sightlessly. He closes his eyes, imagining Steve’s face. His eyes slide back and forth beneath the thin skin, searching a face he cannot see. “You can’t, can you?”

H U R T S

It is the simplest way to explain. It is the truth of this whole wretched experience, down to the ache in his breastbone when he thinks of all that they’ve been through together. Now, and last year when tentatively grafting together a superhero oversight policy stopped ending in screaming matches and started ending in awkward small talk, and then short walks to the elevator, and then, incredibly, their first coffee run. After that, it was like they’d broken open the cast that had been wrapped around their shattered friendship and found the bond still there, raw and aching and new. The year before, which Steve doesn’t like to think of at all, the end of which found them both back from the dead and terrified by a world shaped entirely by the brutal efficiency and borderline-sociopathy of Maria Hill and Reed Richards running a program that should have been built on warmth and ethics and a nurturing environment for young minds. The parts of that year that he cannot bear and yet returns to time and time again: friends and family splayed out in the street like bloody roadkill, faces made unrecognisable by wounds or twisted in anger. Tony, bleeding under his shield. Tony, above him and wreathed in light, metal that he had always trusted to catch him when he fell and be his shield and sword and eternal companion now slamming against his face, his ribs, bruising and breaking the skin.

“Yeah,” Tony says. He swallows. “Where will you go?”

B O D Y

Tony frowns, and Steve cups his face in his hands and presses a kiss to his forehead. He murmurs a soft prayer against the skin there.

“It’ll be hard on you to wait.”

A L W A Y S I S

“Don’t be a smartass.”

Steve grins. He presses his face to Tony’s temple.

I L O V E Y O U

It’s a risk. He knows, after how Tony reacted the last time, that it’s a hell of a risk. Tony might lash out. He might-

“I love you, Steve.”

Steve sucks in a breath. His nose stings. He tilts Tony up to face him, and the look in his eyes is so fierce and lovely and lost that he barely even notices the way his own chest shudders. The way his own mouth is trembling.

“Say it again,” he begs. “Please.”

And then, when Tony just looks sightlessly up at him, he taps it out:

A G A I N

A trembling smile quirks Tony’s mouth.

P L E A S E

“I love you,” Tony repeats dutifully, and the sob that tears its way out of Steve’s chest is a violent, squirming thing with too many teeth. It wrecks him bone-deep, inside and out. “ _Steve_.”

Steve fairly melts into Tony’s lap. He buries his face into his neck, wraps around him like an octopus. He never wants to let go.

“Oh, beloved,” Tony murmurs. He rubs Steve’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry. Fuck, I’m so sorry, Steve-“

“Shut up,” Steve says, and then he kisses him, because he doesn’t know what else do to. He kisses Tony hard, teeth clacking unattractively before he’s able to get the angle right, but that seems fitting for this moment. He pours everything he’s felt since his death into the kiss: his anguish, his frustration, his anger, his tenderness. His sorrow, guilt, grief. He lets it all go, and Tony just takes it. He takes it, and he holds Steve in his arms, and he lets him come apart.

“I love you,” Steve speaks against his mouth. “Bring me back to you.”

“I’ll bring you back,” Tony says. It is both attestation and prayer. “I’ll fix this, Steve, I promise you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go! Almost there. Formatting this fic is a beotch let me fuckin' tell you kids. Why did I need an epigraph for every fuckin' chapter? Because I am extra, that is why. Smh.


	10. the unbearable weight of staying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: canon-typical violence, ~~overwhelming amounts of sappiness haha~~
> 
> I spent way too long trying to format the epigraph for this chapter and it's still not right I give up just go read the actual poem guys it's good I promise.
> 
> Chapter title from Warsan Shire's ["The Unbearable Weight of Staying"](https://genius.com/Warsan-shire-the-unbearable-weight-of-staying-annotated)

> You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
> 
> just couldn’t say it out loud.
> 
> Actually, you said _Love, for you,_
> 
> _is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s_
> 
> _terrifying. No one_
> 
> _will ever want to sleep with you._
> 
> Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
> 
> we have had our difficulties and there are many things
> 
> I want to ask you.
> 
> Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
> 
> Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
> 
> – Richard Siken, “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out"

Tony must have convinced Maria to set up a screen in the room where Steve’s body is being kept. He knows this because about half an hour into waiting, an Agent Katri comes in and does so, a vaguely perturbed expression on her face. She sweeps dark hair back from her eyes, a long, aquiline nose leading her face as she peers around the room like a bloodhound.

“Er,” she says. She straightens, takes a deep breath. “If you can hear me, Captain America, sir, I’ve set the monitor up so you can keep abreast of Iron Man’s mission.”

Steve, who has been watching curiously over her shoulder the whole time, bites back a grin.

“I’m, uh. I’m gonna go now.”

“Boo,” Steve says, just to amuse himself. He watches her scurry from the room with an admittedly uncharitable snicker.

He glances at the screen, but it’s presently just a blank split view in preparation for Tony and Jim’s respective views from the helmets. Steve wishes Tony had told him about it beforehand, because frankly, he wishes he didn’t have the screen. He wants to be there, to find out who had done this to him and beat them with his own two fists. He does not want to watch from afar, a powerless victim with no recourse for action beyond waiting. It’s enough to make fury writhe in his gut like centipede.

He goes to look at his body, but there’s nothing particularly exciting to see there. Just the same pane of glass, slightly frosted with cold, his body’s pale bluish face beneath it.

“I hate this,” he says to no one in particular.

Another twenty minutes. Steve does a circuit of the room, sits down, goes back over to the monitor. They should be closing in on the facility right now. Perhaps convening outside as they make any last minute calls. He scrubs a hand over the back of his head.

Five minutes, and he gets sick of looking at the blank monitor.

Ten minutes more and he hums a few old folk songs. An old drinking song. A trench song. Idly, he wishes Tony had told Maria to set him up with some Midnight Racer instead.

Fifteen minutes finds him standing over the glass, looking down into the small square window at his own frozen face.

He almost doesn’t catch it. He’s about to do another circuit of the room, maybe do some shadow boxing or katas, but something about the cryochamber stops him.

_Something’s wrong_ , he thinks, curiously. It’s a distant thought, one that gathers shape and form as he studies his own lifeless face. He leans over it, frowning. What’s wrong?

_Condensation_. It looks almost as if he’s sweating. A fine sheen of liquid dots his body’s brow. He’s being defrosted. The chamber is thawing out.

“Well, that’s not good,” Steve deadpans.

Then the door opens again. For a moment, Steve thinks perhaps Agent Kathri has returned. Instead, however, the strangest possible person is standing in the doorway: a squat, broad silhouette to block out the greater light from the hall.

“ _Logan_?”

Logan, of course, doesn’t answer. He tips his head to the side, closes his eyes. He breathes in deep.

A small smile quirks his lips. It’s a nasty one, the one that promises bloodshed. It’s a smile Steve’s seen many a time, and it instantly relaxes him. Whatever is happening here, it was planned. Tony planned for this. He feels immediately safer.

“Come on, you bastard. I know you’re in here.” He taps the side of his nose. “I can smell ya.”

Steve blinks. He glances at the monitor, then back at Logan. Tony must have called Logan here. He must have suspected something bad might happen to Steve while he was otherwise occupied. Was Tony even in Florida? Was Steve’s killer in the room with him? How long had he been there? How _often_ had he been there?

Logan moves further into the room and lets the door shut behind him. The soft snick of his claws echoes menacingly in the room, and he spreads his arms wide, wide enough that as he circles Steve’s lifeless body he almost scrapes the wall. “Thought you were smart enough to outwit Iron Man? Fat chance o’ that. How many times’ve you failed now, huh Casper?”

“Casper,” Steve repeats.

_I’m the friendly ghost._ The first, completely absurd thought that trickles into Steve’s mind as he tries to keep out of Logan’s way. And then, _Oh_. _Ghost_.

“Hell of an upgrade,” Steve manages, eyes wide as he glances around.

“You can do a lotta things with nanites, it seems. Although the brains tell me ya shouldn’t be messin’ with ‘em. _Your_ brain was already half scrambled before you, what, became one with the suit? We’ve got bets running, so you gotta tell me before I fillet you. How’d you do it? Did you manage to get your hands on a bit of the Bleeding Edge armour? Try to reverse engineer it?” He turns his head ever so slightly, eyes flashing in triumph. “What was the other theory, partner?”

A familiar yellow and black gloved hand comes up from the floor, an equally familiar device glowing in its palm.

The repulsor node fires, and Kitty Pride jumps up out of the floor and rolls to the side just as what looks like a hash of white statics into being in the space that she had occupied. Kitty fires on it again, and a strange, blood-curdling shriek can be heard, like a man’s voice over imperfect radio waves.

“That he tried to give himself some version of Extremis,” she says, and Steve sucks in a breath. The facts fall down like dominoes, neat black and white dots and lines. Data points: Tony and Reed pouring near-silently over monitors together, trading things back and forth and speaking even more opaquely than usual for them. Tony’s almost desperate behaviour last night. The reason only Tony can see or hear or touch him. “It’s over, Ghost.”

Ghost puts up a good fight, Steve will give him that. He takes a chunk out of Logan’s arm, swipes ineffectively through Kitty’s vital areas. He tries for Steve’s body but is quickly turned away by Logan. Slowly, they back him into a corner. Slowly, Kitty’s hits build up until whatever it is—his suit, or his body—begins to give up on him entirely. Patches of skin, human and pale, shine through the shimmering grey mesh of static and shadow in glitching patches. When he speaks, it’s almost impossible to parse his logic. He wanted to kill Tony next, is mostly what Steve gets out of it. It would be an understatement to say that Steve is quite pleased that they never got to that point. He wants nothing more than to go home, in his own body, and curl up in bed. He wants to go for a run. Spar with someone. Read a book. Draw for a few hours. He wants some time alone to process everything that’s happened.

He wants to take Tony apart with his teeth. He wants to sleep for real. He wants this to be over.

“We have sacrificed liberty for convenience!” Ghost screams. Spittle flies from his mouth. “Heads of corporations run our most sacred branches of government! Tony Stark is a cancer-”

Steve would agree with a lot of what he was saying (that last excluded, naturally) if the man wasn’t known for being hired by corporations to harm other corporations. Steve doesn’t think there was much moralising class-rage high ground to stand on when your client list is comprised of names like Roxxon, Justin Hammer, and Wilson Fisk. As it is, he mostly just feels pity. More than anything, what it seems like the man needs is rehabilitative psychiatric therapy.

Kitty dodges a last, desperate attack from Ghost. She slips into the floor to avoid his sharp clawed hands, then comes up behind him and gets him in a headlock. She does something with the glove, pressing it against his neck until a strange, almost hissing sound emanates from it. Ghost slumps, falling to his knees in the small room.

Steve has always loved this. That first moment after a fight, where the adrenalin is still singing in the veins, and triumph sits on the tongue like hard candy. A tremulous smile takes over his face.

“He’s down,” she says, finally. “When will they learn to stop experimenting on their own bodies?”

“Y’know whose room we’re in, don’t ya?”

Kitty frowns, but concedes the point. Then she turns, seemingly a little lost, as a wave of SHIELD agents swarm into the room. Maria Hill follows, her people parting around her in a concentric wave, like school of fish making room for a predator. Behind her is a familiar blue face: Hank McCoy.

“Steve can hear me, correct?” he asks Maria.

“Supposedly,” Maria agrees. She looks as though she’s swallowed a lemon, and Steve laughs a little, tired as if he’d been the one fighting. It’s been a long few months. He’s ready to go home.

“Excellent. Steve, I am going to inject something into your bloodstream once you’ve thawed enough,” Hank explains, making his way towards Steve’s body. “It should counteract and/or kill any intangible nanites or biologic agents that are supressing the serum. Your body will take care of the rest, which will eventually sever your neural link to Tony. The serum has gifted you with some beautifully aggressive macrophages, so I expect your bloodwork will be clean within about two weeks. As for your psyche, your consciousness has been floating around in the aether like a virus, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen to you after your body recovers. There is a question of memory retention.”

Steve sucks in a breath. “I don’t want to forget.”

“But they said it isn’t likely,” Kitty reassures him, as though she heard him. “Hank’s just telling you how it is.”

“You’ll be awake soon, Steve,” Hank reassures him. He opens up the cryochamber, reaches down to gently touch the skin at the side of Steve’s neck with one large blue hand. “We’ll be monitoring your vitals.”

_What about Tony_ , he wants to know. They have, perhaps, become a little co-dependent through this experience. Steve thinks of himself as a relatively self-aware man. He knows that they’ll have work to do when he’s corporeal again. _What about the other team._

“Take him to the medical wing,” Hank says, and all Steve can do is hover and follow along as they unhook him, as they move his body to a gurney and then wheel it down the hall and up a score of floors to the medical wing. He sits awkwardly in a corner of an OR as doctors and nurses poke at him, Hank presiding over all like a large blue conductor.

Tiredness takes him over in a wave. An undefinable sensation builds in his mouth.

_Strange_ , Steve thinks. _It’s like anaesthesia_.

After that, Steve doesn’t think anything at all.

* * *

Steve opens his eyes.

He’s still getting used to that. It feels strange, almost, to be confined to a body. He raises his hands, looks at them in the light slanting through the windows. He turns them over, feels the warmth of the morning sun on his skin.

He’s alive. Day three of his third (Fifth? Sixth?) chance. How many times was it? He’s lost count.

He goes through his morning ablutions slowly, luxuriating in silly things that he’d forgotten about. The way warm water feels on his skin. The sweep of his shaving brush over his jaw, the satisfying scrape of a straight razor. The feeling of his tongue sliding over squeaky clean teeth. The joy of scrubbing shampoo into his hair and using his nails a little, massaging his scalp under the hot water. He takes his time getting dressed. Khakis. Good shoes. A button down shirt. He thinks he’ll probably save the exciting stuff for tomorrow. Right now, he wants breakfast. Bacon. Eggs. He sniffs the air, a familiar scent wafting through the elevator doors. _Waffles_.

The tower kitchen is bustling this morning, and a cheer goes up when he comes into the room. Sam comes forward to embrace him. Clint. Bucky. Luke gives him a back-slapping hug. He finds Hank and initiates that one as a thank you, makes a note to stop by the Baxter Building with something nice for the Richards’. He lets Jarvis ply him with waffles and strawberries and heaps of butter and maple syrup. He wiggles his fingers at Danni. All around him, everyone is touching him, smiling at him.

_Home_ , he thinks. _I’m home._

“How’s it feel?” Sam asks him, quiet. He leans a little into Steve, shoulders touching. “Overwhelmed?”

Steve shakes his head. In any other case, sure, he’d be overwhelmed. But today this is exactly what he wants. All of the people he loves looking at him, _seeing_ him.

“It’s funny,” he says, and the room quiets as some folks nearby blatantly stop what they’re doing to eavesdrop. “I was used to being invisible before the serum. So maybe that part didn’t bother me as much as it might’ve bothered someone else.” The ‘but’ to that sentence hangs unspoken in the room.

Sam smiles softly at him. He nudges him with an elbow. “What do you wanna do, now that you’ve got your body back?”

Steve takes a breath. He shrugs. Reaches out, as casual as he can, and takes a long draught from his coffee cup.

“Where’s Tony?” he asks.

From the expressions on the faces of basically everyone in earshot, his act is about as transparent as cellophane.

Steve hasn’t been alone since he woke up in this body, but he hadn’t seen Tony once. When he’d asked in SHIELD medical, they told him Tony’s team was still on mission, and he’d accepted that. But Bucky and Carol were here, and they’d gone down south with them. So where was Tony? Where was Peter?

“Still in Tampa,” Carol says, mouth twisting up with something that looks like guilt. “He and Rhodey and Spidey stayed behind to liaise with Reed and SHIELD. There’s some tech stuff they’re figuring out, still.”

Steve nods, slowly. He raises an eyebrow at her, because Carol knows him well enough to know what he’s asking: He’s avoiding me, isn’t he?

The way she looks away and turns back to the toaster says a lot.

“Alright,” he says. Suddenly, he feels quite differently about his plans for the day. “Well. It’s been months since I did anything remotely physical and I’m probably rusty. Who’s up first? Best chance to beat me.”

There’s a chorus of boos and laughter from the assembled group, and Steve grins at his family as they heckle him.

“Nobody here was born yesterday,” Bucky tells him.

Jess laughs. “Try another line, Cap.”

“I don’t need a handicap to fight Captain Tightpants,” Luke retorts.

“So you’re first then?” Steve asks him, and Luke huffs and puts down his coffee mug with a decisive clink.

“If everyone else is too chicken.”

Steve pushes another piece of waffle in his mouth and tries not to laugh while he’s eating as all of the Avengers dog pile on Luke. He puts Tony out of his mind for the moment. Instead he watches the way the light pours in and turns the kitchen golden, burnishes the skin and hair of everyone in the room and limns them like an oil painting.

_First breakfast_ , he thinks, and then he chuckles to himself.

Bucky leans in, under the pretext of reaching for the blueberry carton.

“Give him time,” he says.

Steve turns to look at him, startled, but he’s already pulling away. He waves a metal hand over his shoulder and goes over to pour himself some coffee. Then Sam touches him to get his attention, and Danni wants to play peek-a-boo, and the moment to ask passes him by.

\--

On day five, Steve begins to take Tony’s absence personally.

They’re all back from Florida now. He knows this because Peter marched in and told him so, a determined glint in his eye that was readable even through the mask. It was his posture, maybe, or the way he held himself. It spoke of an argument, and what Steve wouldn’t give to have heard whatever it is they argued about that involved Steve.

Then Peter told him: “Tony’s being an idiot.”

_Ah_ , Steve thought, _so you’re just going to tell me._

God Bless Peter Parker.

“You heard our conversation, in the kitchen,” Peter says, because that’s the kind of man he is. Steve can’t help the fond smile that spills over his face.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna talk to him?”

“I’m gonna try,” Steve says evenly. “You know where he’s at?”

Peter shakes his head. “But,” he says, “I bet Rhodey does.”

Steve stills. He puts a bookmark in the book he was reading and sets it down carefully on the table. “James is here? Not with Tony?”

“Nope,” Peter says, with the kind of glee that only shit-stirrers can manifest. “He’s in the common room drinking a beer and arguing about Dog Cops with Clint.”

“Bless you,” Steve says under his breath, before he can stop himself. Peter laughs. “Thanks, Spidey.”

“No problem, Cap.” He hesitates, rocking back and forth, before reaching out and awkwardly patting him on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re ok.”

Steve rises and pulls Peter into a hug. He freezes for a moment, two, but then he relaxes into it. He rests his head against Steve’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” Steve whispers, “for believing him.”

Peter wriggles, and Steve lets him go. He grins unrepentantly as Peter crosses his arms, awkward, then uncrosses them and scratches at the back of his head.

“Yeah, well. I had to learn something from all that drama.”

“And what did you learn?” Steve prompts, as gently as he can.

Peter stills. He sucks in a breath. Then he turns, and fixes Steve with those fearless white-lensed eyes. “Sometimes that’s all he needs.”

The words land like a physical blow, but it’s a necessary one. Tony has been compared to Cassandra more times than Steve can count. It’s an old, tired metaphor. But still, the classics are sometimes classic because their lessons are important. Because they teach something new to each successive generation.

Steve opens his mouth, not sure what is going to emerge, but Peter holds up a hand to stop him and turns away.

“Gotta run.” The lie is flagrant enough that Steve snorts. “Later, Cap.”

He’s gone before Steve can say more.

\--

Jim is alone by the time Steve gets upstairs, which is convenient. He’s watching a basketball game without putting much attention to it, and when Steve enters he stands up and reaches a hand out to clasp arms, bringing Steve into his body for a back-slapping hug.

“Cap, it’s great to see you up and moving.”

“Thanks, Jim,” Steve says, and Jim laughs ruefully.

“Still the only person who calls me that who isn’t my eighty year old uncle.”

“A young whippersnapper, huh?” Steve quips, and Jim snorts. “I was hoping you could tell me where Tony is.” Steve just comes right out and says it. He and Rhodes are, in some ways, the same kind of animal. He knows this is the best tactic to getting his help, and so he puts on his best gee-golly-shucks expression and rubs the back of his neck, saying, “I think he’s avoiding me.”

Jim snorts again and sits back down on the couch. He offers Steve a beer, then shrugs and leans back when he doesn’t take it. He takes a big swig of his own drink. “Do you know what the most astonishing thing about Tony Stark is?”

Steve could laugh, but it’s clear that the man is serious. He takes a slow, considering breath. He thinks of Tony’s mind, his generosity, his wealth, his looks. He isn’t sure where Jim’s driving him. “That’s a big question,” he says, finally. “Everything about him is unbelievable.”

Jim nods. He turns his eyes to the television, expression twisted into something wry and almost bleak. “It’s his inability to take anything for granted,” he says, and Steve hums in agreement. He perches on the arm of the couch. “It’s incredible. He’s the richest man in the country and the only thing he’s ever taken for granted in his whole tragic, little White rich boy life is that bad things happen to him. Always.” There’s an overwhelming fondness in Jim’s words that take the sting out of them. But then, Steve has never doubted Jim’s love for Tony.

He turns and pins Steve with his gaze, penetrating and brightly intelligent. His mouth turns up at the corner. “Have you seen his face, when he gets bad news?” he asks, shaking his head. “I’ve been friends with Tony a long time. It’s never surprise. Before grief, before anything, it’s resignation. Sometimes I’ve thought that if I could have one wish, one stupid worthless wish, it would be to take that from him. That feeling I know he feels, that bad things happening to him are what is true and right and normal.”

Steve nods, and stays quiet. He can sense that Jim is working up to a shovel talk, and he has the strange thought that maybe this is how other people feel when they talk to him. It makes an inappropriate burst of laughter nearly creep out from inside, but he stifles it down sternly. No one’s ever given Steve a shovel talk before. He doesn’t think it’s ever been warranted, but this one is. As always, Tony is special.

“Are you a good thing for Tony, Steve?”

Steve swallows. He looks down at his hands, folded in his lap. “I’d like to think so.”

“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” Jim persists, but he’s out of luck with that tack. Steve couldn’t agree more.

“I know that. Relationships are about hard work.” Steve smiles, bittersweet and true. “We’ve had a lot of hard, recently. But it’s worth it, I think. He’s worth it.”

“He’ll fight you.”

“He’s always fought me.” Steve tips his head up and grins the grin that he knows Tony calls blinding. “It’s part of what we like about each other.”

Jim laughs at that. He tips his head back, teeth gleaming in the light. It’s a true belly laugh, deep and good, and Steve basks in it. He’s always liked Jim, even if they aren’t close by any measure.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright.” He sighs, and wipes a tired hand over his face. “He was at Avery Yamashita’s parents’ house this morning. They live in Bansall, CA. He wanted them to know what happened to their kid. If he’s on schedule, he’s headed to Cape May, NJ now, visiting the Thomases. He took the suit. He’ll be back tonight.”

Steve sighs, all the fight going out of him all at once. Sympathetic pain echoes through his chest. “One day, that guilt he carries is going to swallow him whole.”

“Already did,” Jim counters. “It’s called alcoholism.”

Steve winces, because he doesn’t have anything good to say to that.

“Thanks,” he tells him, and Jim nods.

“Be gentle with him.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, slowly. “I’m learning that.”

* * *

When Tony gets into the darkened workshop, he’s visibly exhausted. The armour peels off of him like a selkie shedding its skin, until there he is: dark, tousled hair, and the bags under his eyes, a little thin and almost swaying with how tired he is.

It’s the perfect time for Steve to strike.

“Hey, Shellhead,” he says, quietly enough that he hopes Tony doesn’t startle too bad.

Tony spins around, eyes wide in his face. Panic is skittering over him, quickly being replaced by defensiveness, and Steve holds up his hands in placation.

“Whoa, whoa, it’s just me, Tony. Friday, can we have lights? Warm, not too bright.”

Steve smiles as Friday obliges him. He steps forward, tentatively, hands held out towards Tony.

“Oh, God,” Tony says. His whole body trembles, one hand reaching up to cover his mouth. He looks like he might go down, and Steve smiles at him and comes close and gathers him into his arms. He presses Tony’s face into his neck, buries his own face there, into the gap between jaw and shoulder. He inhales as deep as he can, until he’s dizzy with it: sweat, and metal, and that woodsy, herbal scent that Tony likes so much. Cedar, maybe, and oranges. “Oh, God, Steve.”

“You almost couldn’t believe it.”

“Yes,” Tony says, but he didn’t need to.

“I’m here,” Steve tells him, anyway. “You brought me home, just like you promised.”

“You remember,” Tony says wetly, and Steve can’t help the rumbling laugh that bursts out of him.

“ _Tony_ ,” he admonishes, “didn’t you talk to anybody?”

“I couldn’t…they didn’t know. About us. I couldn’t-”

“How long were you going to avoid me?” Steve asks. He presses a soft kiss to the skin above Tony’s collarbone, and the _sound_ he makes. It’s broken and desperate and utterly lovely, all at once.

“Only ‘til tomorrow morning,” Tony admits. “I just…You got killed because of me. _Again_.”

Steve frowns. He pulls away, just far enough to search Tony’s face. “First of all, no,” he tells him sternly, and he smiles when Tony looses a slightly hysterical laugh. “Second of all, you also saved me, so if we’re keeping count…”

“Steve-” Tony tries, but Steve hushes him. He presses their foreheads together.

“Let’s go up to the balcony,” he tells Tony. “We can sit outside. It’s a beautiful night.”

“Okay,” Tony says. He lets Steve guide him upstairs, almost as if in a trance, or a dream. He keeps sneaking peeks at Steve’s face, almost as if he can’t believe he’s real. Steve knows the feeling. He can’t bear to stop touching Tony’s skin, even if it draws attention when they pass Sam and Clint in the hall. Sam just touches Tony briefly on the arm, smiles at him, lets them go by without a word. He hurries Clint away in the other direction, and so Steve is able to ferry Tony up onto the penthouse balcony without much interruption. He sits Tony down, then pops into the kitchen to ask Jarvis to make some hot tea. He brings out a thick warm blanket, and then he takes it all out and wraps both of them up in it. He presses the warm ceramic into Tony’s trembling hands.

For a long time, they sit in silence, looking out over the city. The last of the sunset is fading now, red bleeding into purple, purple bleeding into grey. Slowly, Tony sips his tea, until the shaking subsides. Slowly, the tension bleeds out of him, streaming away in every direction into the dark night.

Steve bumps his shoulder against Tony, then leans over. He pillows his head against him.

“Do you remember the first time I saw you after Rumiko died?”

Tony stiffens under the lee of his body. He sucks in a slow breath.

“Bits.”

“You really, really wanted a drink,” Steve says, and Tony sketches out something that barely resembles a laugh.

“Yeah.”

“So instead-”

“I got so fucking high I couldn’t feel my toes?”

Steve smiles a little. He reaches out and takes Tony’s free hand where it’s fisted on his knee, unwrapping his fingers gently. He laces their hands together.

“I’ll never forget leaving you when you needed me the most. You in that stupid, dirty room, so far from where you belonged. I was too weak-”

“Steve, what-”

“You’ve apologised a thousand times. To everyone in this building. On television. To the country. So just…let me speak.” Tony sighs, but he’s still feeling quite tender. He submits to Steve’s protestations, relaxing against him. He lets his head fall against Steve’s. “I promised myself I’d never do that to you again. I promised I’d never walk out on you when you needed my support. And I…I fucked it up. I left you, again, when you needed me most. So soon after -”

“Please stop,” Tony begs him, and Steve sucks in a shaky breath. He tightens his hold on Tony’s hand.

“So you were blazed out of your mind-”

“Didn’t know you knew that phrase, grandpa-”

“-and we sat together and watched that really depressing animated film, about the robot detective and the AI-”

“ _Ghost in the Shell_?”

“And you were babbling—half in Japanese, half in English—about how Rumiko’s ideas could never die, and so she would never die. That she was a part of you now, always, because of how she’d changed you. Do you remember?”

Tony just breathes for a moment, thinking. “Not really,” he admits. “But not all of us have perfect recall, Steve.”

Steve nods against Tony’s shoulder. “Fair enough.”

Tony huffs, but there’s a smile in it. Steve doesn’t need to turn his head to see it. He knows Tony, maybe better than anyone. He can see his rueful, pained smile in his mind as easy as anything.

“What’s your point, Steve?”

Steve smiles. He tilts his head, presses his mouth against the seam of Tony’s shirt for a moment. He savours the feeling of the fabric under the thin skin of his lips, against his cheek. He feels Tony breathe against him.

“I’m the Ghost in the Machine,” he says. “You were the only compatible system. It took a perfect storm of the serum, Ghost’s mutable biologic nanites, and the last dregs of Extremis to keep me alive all this time. Without you, Ghost would have won. He would have killed me, and no one would have ever known why or how. You saved my life, because we’re compatible. You and me. Connected, like we’ve always been.” He laughs a little, mostly at himself. “I don’t know. I think it’s kind of romantic, actually.”

Tony swallows audibly. “You’ve always been a sap,” he allows. He pulls away, then, and Steve lets him. He waits as Tony turns to face him with his eyebrows raised, his expression deceptively amused. It does nothing to disguise his terror, but Steve knows that this is just Tony’s way of preserving his pride. He’ll fix it, anyhow. He’s going to fix all of it. “Is that it, then? Is that the end of your big Captain America speech?”

“No,” Steve says. He reaches up to cup Tony’s face. He isn’t sure what his expression is doing, but whatever it is, Tony melts into him. His eyes are wide and gleaming. “I love you, Tony Stark. I think I’ve loved you since I first saw you. The first face I saw in the future: bright blue eyes behind a golden helmet, like something out of a storybook.”

He’s almost surprised when he’s able to lean in and kiss Tony: easy, effortless, like he belongs there. Like Tony was meant to be there, sweet and trembling under Steve’s mouth. He takes Tony’s face between his hands, runs his fingers through his hair. He presses fervent kisses to his eyebrows, his cheekbones, the little patch of hair under his lower lip. He slips his fingers down, thumbs tracing the tendons of Tony’s throat, fingertips sliding over Tony’s chest, his stomach. He takes Tony’s waist in his palms and marvels at how easy it is to move him, to pull him into his lap and press their bodies together, chest to chest. It’s a miracle that Tony manages to get the tea on the table without spilling it.

“Steve,” Tony whispers, and Steve opens his mouth against Tony’s pulse, leaves a sucking kiss to show Tony that he’s here, now, and in the future, and for days to come. “Steve.”

“I love you, and you’re an idiot,” Steve says, and Tony laughs wetly, his mouth pressed to Steve’s temple, gasping and warm. “You’re an idiot, and I’m an idiot, and I’m sick of wasting time we don’t have. This is our third chance, Tony. I don’t think we get another one. This is our chance to make things right, the way they always should have been. To be together. Like it was meant to be.”

Tony hiccoughs a laugh. His fingers are clenched in Steve’s hair, flexing against the nape of his neck. He’s silhouetted against the sky, and that seems fitting, too. It’s how Steve is used to seeing him: above him, shining and glorious.

“There, I’m done,” Steve says, smiling at him. “That’s my speech.”

Tony leans down and takes a kiss, this one deeper than the others. He slips his tongue into Steve’s mouth, slow and sexy and a little filthy, and Steve takes it. He closes his eyes and lets Tony take whatever he wants from him. He bunches his fingers in Tony’s shirt to keep him close, traces his fingers over the muscles in his back.

“And how exactly are we supposed to become one, huh?” Tony asks, his lips moving against Steve’s mouth. Steve grins, takes Tony’s plush lower lip between his teeth.

“Don’t play dumb,” he tells him. “It’s not at all convincing.”

Tony laughs, his head tipping back, baring the long line of his throat. Against his skin, old bruises from battle run into the new: mottled yellow and green mixing with the new red and purple, layers of evidence of Steve’s mouth overlapping and mixing against the olive tones of his throat. _Proof of life._ Behind him, the sky is lit dark blue and beautiful. His eyes are crinkled closed with laughter. He is still the most beautiful man Steve’s ever seen.

“I adore you,” Tony whispers, like he’s gifting Steve a secret, and the verity of it makes Steve shudder. Tony’s eyes are so bright. “And I’m so fucking glad you’re alive.”

“I want you to take me for granted,” Steve confesses in return. He closes his eyes, presses his forehead to Tony’s. “I want you to be able to trust me again, like we used to. I want to trust you like that, too.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Tony says. He’s overwhelmed. Happiness is a dangerous thing, on Tony. He doesn’t know what to do with it. It spills out of him like light.

“Then let me show you. Let me prove it to you.”

Tony smiles down at him, helplessly fond. “And how are you going to do that?”

“I’ll love you,” Steve promises, “until the day I die for good.”

He hopes that day is a long, long way away from now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uuuuugh I struggled with this so much so sorry that it's being posted a little late. I feel like I'm dissatisfied with the ending. But I don't want to bias anyone towards it, so that's all I'll say haha. Maybe it's just that I've been staring at this chapter on and off for two whole weeks and I don't know what's good anymore...
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the fic!! Let me know what you thought. This one was hard to end for me. :<
> 
> ~~off to sleep for a bazillion years~~

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes on setting: this is mostly 616 compliant up until Civil War. I'm not a stickler about canon, so this is operating in a handwavey place. I have basically scrapped every single thing that happened after, i.e. Incursions, Skrulls, etc. because I just…didn't want to deal with that much angst here lol. Steve came back. Tony deleted his brain/mostly lost Extremis. Those adorable scenes with Tony & Bucky being chill buds from Winter Soldier Vol. 2 (2019) are referenced here too, but placed in a different context. Some of the background info is MCU-ified for simplicity. Pepper is CEO of SI, which is Tony's current company, which he designs for. The SHRA has, post-War, been changed into something closer to the Accords, where you need some kind of official acknowledgement if you're going to be engaging in combat as a hero but otherwise you'll be left alone. (A little similar to What If?) All of the heroes are learning to get along again/navigate this brand new world. I know all of this really matters to some readers, but tbh it is not super relevant to this story. This is not a Fix-It for all of the complex political issues in Civil War, because I've been doing that for years in And the Body and I wasn't in the mood for that here. This is basically just a Stony retelling of Ghost (1990). There, I said it. Prepare for mutual pining, eavesdropping ghost!Steve, dramatic reveals, and lots of crying. That's it. That's the fic.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Art] cap-im BB 2020: team DELTA](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27580319) by [oluka (lomku)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lomku/pseuds/oluka)




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